Unable to Boot Win7HomeEditionx64

[Whazzupdoc]

State of wife's computer...ANewman1 (not this one) is critical. It crashed after a couple of days last week where it became slow to respond...a grinding noise in the cpu. I believed it to be Windows trying to do an update (which it's supposed to do automatically) but checked anyway. Sure enough there were 3 critical and I authorized the download/installs. After restart the fairly new (4mos) Dell monitor started displaying print over news articles and acting strange. The wide screen had changed to something unfamiliar. So I thought I could go to an earlier WinUpdate (4/03) when everything was working. It crashed during the process. I tried to bring it back up and I'm brought to the boot screen (where I am given options, BIOS, etc.) but then I'm given the choice to load Windows normally or repair. I tried both but I'm put in a loop. Now, I have to say this although I know I'm going to sound like a complete idiot...my vision is not good and it was 10:00pm...it asked for the system disc. I grabbed a new XP by mistake and put it in the caddy. It started running and the process started to show all the files being loaded. At some point I was asked if I was sure I wanted to load the XP O/S or did I prefer to go to a new (Win10) O/S. That got my attention and I cancelled the process. So I believe what I've done is corrupted the boot programs by my little XP trick...and I don't know where to begin and what to do to get my wife's computer back up and running again.

I daily backup everything on both our systems. I pulled her 1TB peripheral and checked the Macrium Reflect backups. It does Incremental and Full. Incrementals are daily and weekly and then I believe every 6mos it does a full. They're all there up to 4/07 and they go back to Thanksgiving last year. Now I believe that if I can either clean install (don't even know what I'm saying) and once her Win7x64 Home Edition is reinstalled then somehow do a Macrium Backup (never done it before) then just maybe everything isn't a total loss???

I was unable to contact 7Forums from her computer for obvious reasons. I can't run any of the tests that you want/need to analyze her system. I can't take snippets. I don't even know how to reboot from a thumb. Her system and mine are very similar...not exact but close. I do have my Macrium Boot (Thumb Drive). Hers I can't find but they were both done at the same time. Is it possible to use my boot thumb drive on her computer?...and if so, what are the a-b-c's of successfully doing so. Do you know if Macrium identifies each computer backup attempt...i.e., can it recognize that I'm trying to boot on my wife's computer?

Thanks in advance!
Doc

 

[Ranger4]

Yes, you should be able to use your Macrium booting thumb drive on your wife's computer.

Where are her back up images stored, are they on a separate drive such as a USB hard drive, or are they stored on a partition on the main OS hard drive. The only problem I can see is if they are stored on the main OS hard drive, then when you grabbed a DVD to do a repair & inadvertently used an XP one, the process may have damaged the back up partition. But you wont know that until you boot her computer using your boot thumb drive & see if you can find the last image back up.

I use Macrium & have occasionally done a full recovery from a Macrium backed up image stored on an external USB hard drive, which usually only takes about 15 minutes.

The grinding noise you mentioned may be due to a dry CPU fan bearing & this may have caused it to slow down dramatically, allowing the CPU to overheat, which can lead to a system crash. So it would be advisable to check that first of all.

 

[Whazzupdoc]

Hi Ranger4...thanks for the reply and attempted help. Let me try to respond and explain the delay in getting back to you. Your email came in on my wife's gmail on her system. At that time (now different) I didn't have access to her gmail I do now and I can open her gmail on my computer. Her computer has been down for over a week but we got some local techs (tough here in Honduruas) and the one actually knew his stuff and how to check out the multiple possibilities for this problem. Long story short...the Iinostor USB WiFi thumb drive...the little 1/2" drive in the front of the computers had crashed. No USB WiFi...no internet. That's been replaced and rebooted. Now it's only the painful process of trying to restore all those little programs necessary to operate her Win7...like the O/S roll-ups...129 of them. But they're all restored.

Truthfully, I don't know what to do about the WD My Pssport Ultra 1Tbyte external where Macrium was storing all of the various backups. I was wrong about the last backup though...it was January 10, 2108. There were no more backups made since that date and I don't know why. The Macrium template called for daily, weekly and the Full backups periodically. I purchased Recuva and did a deep scan because whenever I plugged the Passport into my system to check the contents...it showed zippo. Recuva says the contents are all inside the drive and in excellennt condition...like having a locked room with no key to access. So since I don't know much about this backup/recovery stuff and since we're piece by piece restoring the various programs my wife uses...what's the purpose of discovery of the contents of Macrium's backuups? So I can actually learn something useful from this nightmare, I would really like to know how to access those files that Recuva says are still there...it indicates that they're all pointed toward the Recycle bin...the external was her 'H' drive and it's blank but Recuva says they're iin a folder titled 'Recycle'. Now when I go to her desktop and look inside her Recycle Bin with the H-Drive connected it is empty. So I thought that all devices have recycle bins and would show up in this manner but they didn't. So there's got to be a way to look at the H-Drive contents...surely??? If not then how can I ever trust this peripheral drive again? Still a lot of unanswered question. I know I've bought 2 internal SSD's which I'll have installed as large secondary hard drives...just in case the existing spinning HD's should ever fail in the future.

 

[Megahertz07]

Does your external WD My Pssport is boot able on Macrium?
If not, create on ANOTHER flash disk a boot able on Macrium. How to create USB rescue media
(it says the process is NON destructive, no volumes will be overwritten or removed during USB media creation, but better be safe than sorry)
Boot from it and access the images on the WD My Pssport.

 

[Whazzupdoc]

Unable to Boot Win7HomeEditionx64 Reply to Thread

Thank you for the advise. I will try it and get back to you afterwards (hopefully today or tomorrow).

Doc

 

[Whazzupdoc]

Unable to Boot Win7HomeEditionx64 Reply to Thread

I just checked my thumb drives...all FAT32. So where does that leave me? I currently don't own another large external drive to allow for both sectors. It seems to me that the 1st thumb boot I did from Macrium was all on that one thumb drive.

Doc