Windows 7 hangs on Welcome screen after power outage (again)

[tripwire45]

I had posted all this several days ago, but for some reason, my thread vanished. Below is the compilation of two posts I made to the original thread recording the problem and what I've tried to do to resolve it.

This is what I posted on September 18th:

Having a tough time with my Windows 7 Pro computer. Last night we had a five second power outage while I was watching a DVD on my PC. When the power came back on and I tried to book, I got a message telling me to use my recovery disc to repair my computer.

I tried booting normally, and only got as far as the black "Starting Windows" screen. The Windows moving icon never showed up.

Next, I found and booted from the disc. On the System Recovery Options screen, there was nothing listed under Operating System. I selected "Use System Recovery tools" anyway, and then "Start Up repair." After running this once, I rebooted normally and got a login screen. I logged in and the system hung on the Welcome screen.

As it was quite late and I was tired, I went to bed thinking that it would probably load the OS slowly, but it would load, and I'd deal with it in the morning.

When I woke up the next day and checked, the computer was still hung on the Welcome screen.

I restarted the computer and attempted to login in Safe Mode, but after the login screen, it still hung on the Welcome screen.

At this point, I had to go to work, so I shut down the machine.

When I got home, I restarted the PC and pressed F8 and tried to boot into Last Known Good Configuration. I got to the login screen, selected my name, but this time, not even an enter password field was presented.

I shut off the computer and kept reading through the various forums I'd been looking at in search of a solution.

Next I tried rebooting from the recovery disc and selecting the command line option. Then I tried this:

DISKPART
LIST DISK
SELECT DISK #
LIST PARTITION
SELECT PARTITION #
ACTIVE
EXIT

There were 2 partitions, OEM and Primary and I selected primary. Then I tried system repair again which ran just slightly longer. Looking at the Startup Repair Diagnosis and repair details, under "Root cause found," it says:

The partition tables does not have a valid System Partition.

Repair action: Partition table repair.
Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0
Time taken = 6755 ms

Just for giggles, I tried restarting Windows normally.

I got to where I could select myself as a user but again, not even a password field.

I'm at a loss to know what to do. I really need to get back into this machine as I'm in the middle of an important project and I need the data on the PC to work with.

Now this is what I said earlier today:

I started the PC first thing this morning, I figured I'd quickly throw in the DVD to do an in place reinstall. But a screen came up that said it couldn't find disk 0 and offering me several options including pressing F5 for testing and I did.

A pre-boot systems assessment ran and my CD-ROM, Video Card, and a bunch of CPU memory tests all passed, but then the test abruptly stopped with a message saying that it couldn't find a diagnostic partition. I'm assuming that means it couldn't find the OEM partition on my hard drive (although the DST Hard Drive short test passed).

I'm thinking (just a guess) that this is more of a hardware problem than a software problem, but if that's the case, my computer may not be recoverable, at least not without professional help.

Let me know if you have any more ideas. Thanks.

 

[CamileWin]

Provide Make model of computer & make model of hard drive (eg eMachine desktop 1360, Drive isHD WDC-XYZ). Did you have restore points created? Any backups or ISO image?
Your boot partition was recognized since you're able to get to win7 Welcome screen. I think you said you tried a restore from a repair disk, if not do so. Your DST short test passed, but I'd run a full disk diagnostic to be sure. Make a bootable CD with your hard drive manufacture's test utility (Seagate Seatools works on most conventional hard drives) and run the tests to test the integrity of the drive.
Report back all results with any error messages.

 

[tripwire45]

Actually, the whole game has changed. In a fit of pique, after trying various solutions from other sources, I decided to do a fresh install over the OS and figured I'd lose what I'd lose.

Windows 7 went through the whole installation routine, or so it seemed, except at the end, a pop-up appeared saying that Windows 7 could not be installed on this hardware.

So I wiped out my previous Windows 7 install and replaced it with one that won't fully install.

The saving grace is that several years ago, I used Acronis True Image to clone the original OS drive to a larger SATA drive since I was running out of room.

I took the current drive out and replaced it with the old drive and attempted to boot to Windows. Apparently, Acronis automatically tried to recover an OS that hasn't booted in four years. It booted but was incredibly slow and opening any app would cause the system to hang.

Fortunately, I could boot into Safe Mode and perform any available task. After taking a number of stabs at solving the problem, I simply restored the OS to the only restore point available and it worked like a charm.

Now I have to update all of the software since this drive has been in a box for quite awhile.

My plan now is to do what I did before...get this drive updated and then clone it to a larger drive with more room.

A lot of trouble for one lousy five-second power outage.

Thank you for your reply. I appreciate it. Hopefully, this will be the end of this particular saga.

 

[CamileWin]

Thanks for the update. A real hassle for a power outage for sure! I hoped we'd restore the original drive to get your project data off it using the disk diag tools or by repairing the MBR. Glad to hear you have an alternative. I'll bet you can see your file structures on your original drive that got corrupted in the power outage so If you decide to salvage the disk you replaced I'd recommend you see if you can fix the MBR/boot on the corrupted partition so it's once again recognized as the 'system' partition. In your Recovery Tools list, select Command Line, type:
bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot

Close Command Line then run Startup Repair 3 separate times with reboots (even if it says no repair needed)