Repair Windows 7 startup drive in another win 7 machine?
 

My observatory computer drive acted up tonite. Can't get windows 7 to boot. It offers to let me run start up repair or boot normally to windows 7.

Trying to boot to Win 7 causes a reboot after it starts to load maybe 30-45 second in. Up till then it has the normal Windows screen with the 4 colors. Taking startup repair causes it to show a loading file progress bar then blank screen with lots of disk activity and then seemingly the twilight zone. 20 minutes and nothing seems to happen.

So I put the drive into another machine with a functional Windows 7 install and I can see the problem drive without any difficulty. Load files from it etc.

So is there a way to repair the problem installation from the current machine? I'll have to take it home to make any repair DVDs so I'm hoping I can fix it while I'm still here.

Thanks for any help!

just wipe the thing and do a fresh install

format

reinstall

replace files that you copied onto the other computer

Can you boot into safe mode?

stay off youporn

#antivirus

Not on the problem drive. I'm live typing on the machine that now has the drive in it. I'm CHKDSKing it now to see if there are problems.

It has one corrected index file so far

Yep only took 6 months to get all the software installed properly, might be able to reinstall it all in 2-3 weeks.

This. Just backup your data onto another drive, check the drive for disk errors and reinstall if it's still good.

I was going to suggest chkdsk and sfc /scannow....chkdsk will probably fix it for you. If you opt to do a backup and reinstall, you can get a free trial of Acronis to do a backup image.

http://download.cnet.com/Acronis-Tru...ml?tag=mncol;1

try to back up as many program configs as you can before wiping

So, once you get this fixed I assume you will start doing weekly (or nightly) backups, right?

I have a complete drive clone but its probably 3-4 months old at this point. Still it's a perfect nite and hoped to get some imaging time tonite. Actually after the chkdsk it's trying to repair itself. Crosses fingers.

The problem was caused by having to pull the power cord after a program locked up the system.

windows is the suck

try this link perhaps

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/fix-win...e-reboot-loop/

It seems at least mildly reeruned that you can't stick a problem Windows 7 drive in another machine and not be able to un-fubar it but that appears to be the case. .

Frikken Microsoft

system restore....... or erase the entire partition and start new

Next time hold down the power button for 5 seconds.

The choices are clear

Either you have a hardware failure or you have an OS problem. Since the repair won't work, you'll have to reload. If the drive is bad, grab your data if you still can, acquire new HDD; you'll have to reload.

Action items:

Have a scheduled plan for continuity and execute it. Aka a scheduled back up plan.