Repair Install

Normally a repair install would fix this for you, but since the HDD is/may be failing, you could risk losing everything if the repair install fails or freezes up do any drive issue from it failing.

I'm not sure what else to suggest unless you want to use some other backup program like Macrium Reflect.

If you use the Paragon program,bBe sure to do a "Complete Backup" to clone your HDD. Here's the link for the programs manual to help make using it easier.

Paragon Backup & Recovery (Advanced) Free Edition - User Manual

Brink said:

Normally a repair install would fix this for you, but since the HDD is/may be failing, you could risk losing everything if the repair install fails or freezes up do any drive issue from it failing.

I'm not sure what else to suggest unless you want to use some other backup program like Macrium Reflect.

If you use the Paragon program,bBe sure to do a "Complete Backup" to clone your HDD. Here's the link for the programs manual to help make using it easier.

Paragon Backup & Recovery (Advanced) Free Edition - User Manual

Like I said, Paragon isn't really an option considering how slow it is (based on what I read it would take well over 24 hours to back up 340GB).

I have my important files backed up on a 16GB flash drive, most of what's left are just various games, most of which I can redownload easily from Steam.

I'll look into Macrium to see if its any faster but I honestly think its a bigger risk having my PC on for 24+ hours than running Windows repair.

edit: For the record, the drive/my PC haven't crashed at all yet, 2 nights ago when booting up my PC the hard drive started making a loud grinding noise so I shut it down, cleaned around with some canned air (though I'm sure it was the hard drive, not a fan) and it was fine after I rebooted.

edit2: Looked into Macrium and it seems as if it is faster but there are a lot of people having issues with it including a few people claiming it contains malware (I'd hope they're just false positives but you never know).

I can confrim that Macrium Reflect is a safe program as long as you download it from the source.

Hopefully that's all that it was wrong with your HDD, but I would still recommend to create a complete image backup with Macrium or other program just to be safe.

For next time though, you might consider creating a slipstream Windows 7 SP1 installation disc/USB/ISO and keep it updated with new Windows Updates. This way you can use it to do a clean install with, then also repair installs if needed later.

Just tried running it and got an error.

Backup aborted! - Failed to Create Volume Snapshot. Result Code: 0x8004230c

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Not sure if I did something wrong, I just went to create Image, selected my C drive, told it to save on the external and hit go. There was an option to change various settings but I honestly have no clue of what to do with them so I just used whatever was set as default.

edit: Seems to be related to VSS, the same issue I'm having with Windows' backup tool. Should I just create a thread in the proper forum instead of spamming up your thread even more? :P

edit: currently trying out some things, may have it fixed

edit3: Yep, finally found out what was causing it and fixed it. Currently backing up via Macrium and it seems to be going pretty fast, thanks :)

That's great news Moarxx. :)

Hi, welcome to the forums :)

The issue you have is that by performing the Repair install with a higher version of Windows 7 will actually Upgrade your system to the version you have on the disk. To perform a correct Repair install you will need the exact same version on the DVD. For example Home Basic > Home Basic or Ultimate > Ultimate.

You will need to get hold of Windows 7 Home Basic DVD in order to perform the Repair Install


OS

You can upgrade to ultimate and later perform a repair install if you ever needed to. The thing is, would your netbook handle the extra visual resources needed by Ultimate as opposed to Basic?