Windows 7 won't boot anymore. Disk is still accessible.

[fruiten]

Hi!


Intro:
I was playing a game on my primary monitor (in fullscreen) while watching a stream through Chrome on my second monitor. I've done this a million times before without problems.
(I had more stuff running at the time, like Discord. Can't recall exactly what I had going on.)

Out of nowhere, both monitors freeze, but the sound keeps going. Then, the secondary monitor went completely black, while of the primary one the colors went weird on me, as if the colors downgraded from 32bit to 4bit or 2bit.

Out of panic, I pressed and held the Power button on my PC to shut it down.
(At this point, I feared it was hardware failure of either my GPU or power supply.)

Problem:
When I powered up the PC again, it simply hangs at the Windows logo. The animation of the logo still plays, but when it's done loading, it just freezes. (This is Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, installed on an SSD.)

Not the hardware?
Next, I take out the SSD and put it in an old PC.
On that old PC, when the SSD was set to be the first drive in the drive list (in the BIOS), it would again play the Windows logo animation, but in stead of freezing it would give me a blue screen for a few hundred miliseconds, before automatically booting up again.
Safe Mode also would not start.

However, when I changed back the drive order to use the old PC's own HDD (Windows 7 Home Basic 32-bit) for the OS, and I got into Windows, I could access, copy and open files from the SSD.
To be clear on that: I can directly access the entire disk, move, open, delete files, but Windows will not start.
So to me it seems that the SSD itself is not damaged.



What are my options, where do I start?
I'd prefer saving a complete re-install as a last resort, obviously.
These PCs don't have optical disk drives, but I have a USB stick.
Let me know if there's other relevant information I could share.


Thanks for reading,
Regards


Edit: Whoops. Should this have been in Backup and Restore? Sorry!

 

[Ranger4]

Hi fruiten, welcome to the Forum.

It looks like you may have a corrupted Boot Configuration Data situation. If you have a Windows 7 Professional 64 bit installation DVD you should try running Start Up Repair which may require running it 3 times. To do this follow this Forum tutorial.

Startup Repair - Windows 7 Help Forums

 

[fruiten]

Thanks for the reply, and for the welcome.


Unfortunately I don't have an optical disk drive.
I do have a USB stick, but my attempt at creating a bootable external disk didn't go too well.
The problem I ran into was that bootsect wouldn't do it's thing, since this PC is using 32-bit, while I need to create a 64-bit bootable. (I used the official Microsoft WUDT.)
The workaround I found was "oh, just put the 32-bit bootsect in the folder", but to my inexperienced face, that's just too vague. (What folder, and what else do I put there? What do I do/run next? Etc.)


Anyway -- I do have 64-bit Professional in ISO form, but I'm not sure what to do with it now. As I understand it, simply (virtually) mounting the ISO and copying the files onto the USB stick won't work, as that will not make it bootable, so I suppose this is where bootsect.exe is a necessity?


If you/anyone has the time and patience, I'd greatly appreciate some steps that a simple guy could follow. I can assure you that I have been googling, but the solutions would usually not cover my situation, or otherwise just not make enough sense to me.
I'd prefer the simple approach if it can be helped, for example command prompt (rather than some fancy software). But in the end, all I really want is Windows to boot.

..I don't suppose I can just access the disk in Explorer and replace some files?



Thanks again for the reply Ranger4,
Regards

 

[Paul Black]

Hi fruiten,

This might be of use!

If you have the ISO already, you could burn it to a USB using either: Rufus 2.18 or Rufus 2.18 Portable.

I hope this helps!

 

[fruiten]

Thanks a lot for the suggestion. Rufus seems to have properly made the bootable USB stick.

Unfortunately, it wouldn't repair my Windows installation. I fear I might have messed everything up even before I put the SSD into this old PC.

See, I ran System Repair without having any bootable Windows installation. I have no clue how the SR even started up, but I suppose it tried to fix my PC with.. nothing? I'm clueless.

Anyway, I ran the SR a few times before I got hit with a message: "Windows Startup Repair cannot repair this computer automatically.". Only after this, I transferred the SSD into this old PC, to (luckily) find that at least my files are safe.

So now, with this USB bootable, I got the same message after the first try.
Also, the installation was named Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (recovered). Obviously, it's not!

Anyway -- I penned down the log of the Repair thing, figured it might be relevant.
Edit: Oh, no

Spoiler

available apparently. I suppose I'll code it up then:

  Problem Event Name: StartupRepairOffline
Problem signature 01: 0.0.0.0
Problem signature 02: 6.1.7600.16385
Problem signature 03: unknown
Problem signature 04: 21200203
Problem signature 05: AutoFailover
Problem signature 06: 10
Problem signature 07: CorruptAcl
          OS version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.1
           Locale ID: 1033

Is there a way to force the System Repair to run, now that I have a proper USB bootable? I'm just puzzled by how System Repair even ran at all, before I had any kind of bootable available. I wonder if that may have messed everything up?


Thank you guys again,
Regards

 

[torchwood]

Hi Fruiten,

As you can access the data on your old 32Bit comp, would have to say your running 32 bit on >>both<<.
The error codes also back this up., incompatible OS

Suggest you get hold of a 32bit repair disc, T/F it to a bootable Rufus(32bit option).


Roy

 

[Paul Black]

Hi fruiten,

You can download the latest Windows 7 Professional SP1 32-bit ISO file from here: TechBench

Then use the following information:

Windows (Final) > Windows 7 SP1 [build 7601] > Windows 7 Professional SP1 > English > Win_Pro_SP1_English_x32.iso

I hope this helps!

 

[fruiten]

Well, I guess I have properly messed something up, then. :-/

I can promise you that the SSD has Windows 7 64-bit, while the HDD of the old PC has Windows 7 32-bit. I guess I have messed something up very badly while trying to fix the 64-bit install. Perhaps I have somehow overwritten the boot section of the 64-bit install with files meant for a 32-bit install. But I don't know. Or I have just messed up explaining things.
Perhaps I should've unplugged all other disks before running System Repair, heh.


Anyway, I just feel lost now. I suppose I'll start backing up files to prepare for a re-install. :-(
Thanks for the replies, I appreciate it.
Regards

 

[fruiten]

Right. So, I checked what happens if I start either installs while only one disk is plugged in. Turns out I goofed so hard that now both the disks apparently have two sets of boot.

What I mean is, if I plug in only the SSD, it will give me the option to start either Windows 7, or Windows 7 Professional (recovered). The Windows 7 option will just give me some winload error because of course there is not actually a full install present of that version. The Windows 7 Professional (recovered) will still give me the same problem: It plays the animated Windows logo, then freezes.

As for the HDD, for this one it's reversed, as expected. Windows 7 Professional (recovered) gives the winload error, but luckily the 32-bit install still boots and works (as you can see, since that's what I'm using right now).


I don't know at what point it went wrong. More importantly, I don't know how to fix this at all.
It looks like I have somehow managed to equip both disks with two sets of Windows boot.
Is there a way to get rid of the "ghost install" on the HDD?

Edit: After googling, I used msconfig to remove the ghost install from the HDD. Is it possible to remove it on the SSD as well, without the ability to boot into Windows?


Can't believe what I've gotten myself into. :')
Regards

 

[fruiten]

Don't mean to spam, but I figured I should keep the thread up to date, just in case.

I googled how to get rid of the ghost install on the SSD, and it worked using bcdedit after booting from the USB.
Unfortunately that didn't fix the issue. (Windows still won't boot.)

I don't suppose I can reset the "repair attempt" back to 0 somehow in order to force the System Repair to try again?

Google also recommended bootrec /rebuildbcd, but that wouldn't work because "Total identified Windows installations: 0", so I'm currently looking into that.