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Thread: Windows 7 Won't boot

  1. #21
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    To fix the situation, we found a bootable CD that we used to resize the HD, and then, we're moving the Data to a partition, and then, going to change the sizes, and reinstall Windows. This way we have the Data we need, and can reinstall the OS.

  2. #22
    @ÞΜĮЙǐЅŦГǻţΩЯ D0pp139an93r's Avatar
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    Real security doesn't come with an installer.

  3. #23
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm,

    Seems like the last Windows update was flaky to say the least.........I have had three machines in the last week that it had trashed

    Fixboot and fixmbr didn't work but fortunately the repair install did.

    As for data recovery, I bought a SATA docking station a while back (didn't cost more than $20) that has proved invaluable. It will take 2.5 and 3.5 drives up to 1TB and you can obviously use it to backup data onto as many drives as you like.

    OK it's damned ugly compared to an external HDD but a lot cheaper and more flexible.

    The problem is that it is USB2, so a 1TB drive would take up to 15 hours to copy at the speeds I am used to getting

    I will be looking for a USB3 docking station shortly

    I am just building myself a new machine that will support 6 SATA3 drives and 2 external USB3 devices.

    I also have a couple of older caddies for 2.5 and 3.5 EIDE drives.

    I don't know what you think about it gore, but you do have several machines and it might be worth your while investing in something similar?

  4. #24
    They call me the Hunted foxyloxley's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by nihil View Post
    I don't know what you think about it gore, but you do have several machines and it might be worth your while investing in something similar?
    me suggest you check out a NAS box
    2 x 2TB drives mirrored will be suffice to keep your data for a wee while, and the mirror for the paranoid amongst us , to give you the additional security too
    so now I'm in my SIXTIES FFS
    WTAF, how did that happen, so no more alterations to the sig, it will remain as is now

    Beware of Geeks bearing GIF's
    come and waste the day :P at The Taz Zone

  5. #25
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    My Wife and I have the machine fixed now, and Windows 7 is reinstalled, and we managed to get the Data off of it. I finally got some sleep too. We both are looking at a Net Drive, because even though my Server is decent, it can't back up the 1 TB drive She has so a TB Net Drive would more than work for us.

    We found some on sale that were actually really well priced as well, so we are probably going to buy one and slap it on our Network.

  6. #26
    Junior Member goreswife's Avatar
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    Gosh this whole ordeal was a total nightmare. After the hubby spent all night trying to fix the problem, I got pissed and called Microsoft. That was fun. First off, asking for Technical Support somehow sends you to customer service, where some idiot basically told me I needed to call tech support, he gave me a number to call.

    Sooooo, I called that number, turns out the idiot gave me the Windows Activation line number, sometimes I wonder how those people manage to keep their job. I ended up calling back, getting transferred and then I got stuck on the phone for two hours with some woman who obviously was as dumb as a rock. At one point she had me go into c:\Windows and basically type, at the command prompt, c:\Windows\something\something.xml and she seemed surprise when it didn't work. Then she told me to type "cd c:" and then "cd Windows", I was like "so basically you want me to go back to the root of the drive and then go back to where I already am right now?

    In the end, she wasted two hours of my time and ended up telling me that the only thing to do was to send a tech here to back up my data and reinstall, which I'm perfectly capable of doing myself.

    Gore had said that when he'd tried to resize the partition it showed up as locked. I figured I'd give it another go and found a partition manager that had a bootable cd option. This little cd is amazing, it's under 40 megs and that was possibly the fastest resize I've ever seen.

    Here's the link, it's definitely a tool that I'm going to be keeping in my collection from now on:
    http://partitionwizard.com/partition...FQvCKgod2CSU-Q

    So I ended up resizing the partition, throwing all my data on the new partition and then reinstalling. I grabbed Slax and threw it on my usb key, I grabbed a bunch of other live distros because at first the plan was to just ftp the data over, but for some reason, it's a pain to find a live distro with a GUI ftp client. Once I managed to resize, there was no need for that. I must say that the bootable cd has me very impressed, I've used quite a few different partition tools before and this one rocks. Not just that, the bootable cd and home versions are also free.

    What really annoyed me was that the girl from MS was basically blaming me for the whole thing, she said it was more than likely a hardware issue. When I pointed out that I knew for a fact it was NOT, she started saying that my hardware probably conflicted with the update.

    Now I'm very weary of even installing any updates, I really don't feel like doing this again. I mean it's one thing to reinstall Windows, but I'm not looking forward to redoing my WoW install, setting up rocketdock again. I'm hoping that when I reinstall Calibre, it will be able to read the libraries I'd created before because I really do not feel like editing about 2 gigs of ebooks by hand, one by one, again. The first time it took me about a week to do it.

    As soon as we have some extra money, I'm going to invest into a decent external hdd, I saw a 3 TB one for 120 bucks last night. My desktop is the most recent machine we have, so we couldn't really throw the hdd in any other machine.

    The BSOD had me scratching my head because it was just such an odd one, usually when you get a blue screen, there's quite a bit of data on the screen, this one was just strange, it was basically an 8 char hex code, and it said "hard error" and nothing else at all. After I rebooted, the recovery console got stuck in an infinite loop, no matter what we did.

    I'm so happy to have my machine back up and running, I've dealt with a lot of computer issues over the years, but I must say that when it's your own machine it's always different. When you're working on someone else's machine, it's not personal, but when it's your own machine and your own data that's at stake, it's hard not to get mad and well when you get too angry, it's hard to think straight.

    I seem to attract strange issues. My old desktop had a raidmax scorpio case that had a blue LED on the front, by the power button. At one point, my dvd drive wouldn't work and I couldn't figure out why, I started unplugging everything, then I hooked up the dvd drive and it worked fine, I started plugging things back in one by one, and I figured out what was causing the problem, all I had to do to get the drive working was unplug the LED on the front of the case, to this day, this issue makes no sense at all.
    Out there in the darkness, they're coming after me, a thousand stalking zombies, they want my brains to feed.

  7. #27
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    I'm going to invest into a decent external hdd, I saw a 3 TB one for 120 bucks last night
    Please be careful there, the prices are going to fall dramatically if the connection is USB2. My docking station doesn't give much above 30MB/sec and I can currently buy a USB adapter to connect bare SATA 2.5" and 3.5" drives to a USB3 port for £20. They claim that will give 300MB/sec against a "standard" of 625MB/sec. Still 10x USB2 transfer rates.

    Also, today's motherboards are shipping with external SATA ports.............

    In my situation I prefer the docking station as it accepts both sizes without an adapter and I can use as many bare drives as I like

    I seem to attract strange issues. My old desktop had a raidmax scorpio case that had a blue LED on the front, by the power button. At one point, my dvd drive wouldn't work and I couldn't figure out why, I started unplugging everything, then I hooked up the dvd drive and it worked fine, I started plugging things back in one by one, and I figured out what was causing the problem, all I had to do to get the drive working was unplug the LED on the front of the case, to this day, this issue makes no sense at all.
    It shouldn't be a PSU issue as the supplies are separate. My guess would be that the LED was on the way out and sending some sort of backscatter signal to the MoBo.

    It's certainly a new one on me but I have seen strange things happen with failing Video cards, sound cards, RAM, and dial-up modems. I am afraid that poor old Billy Windows gets very confused, so the error messages tend to be more of a hindrance than a help.

    I had a weird one the other day. An XP pro SP3 box that was giving a variety of "XXXXXX has had a problem and had to close, we are sorry for any inconvenience" messages for apparently random Windows apps/services. Nothing in the logs made any sense, and a repair install didn't help.

    I eventually decided to try a known working stick of RAM. One of the sticks I removed showed slight signs of carbonisation on one of its contacts.......that's what it was, yet it had passed both Memtest86 and the Microsoft memory tester without any problems (several passes). I had already put in a known working videocard and cloned a new HDD so I guessed that left me with RAM or a hosed MoBo.

    EDIT:

    As for Windows updates, the problems I have seen with this last one all happened when the machine was running something else. I know it says that you can continue working, but I haven't trusted that or automatic updates in ages
    Last edited by nihil; August 21st, 2011 at 01:51 PM.

  8. #28
    Junior Member goreswife's Avatar
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    See, I'm not so much concerned about speed. My main issue is not to ever get stuck in that position again. Normally I have a separate partition for data, but things didn't really go as planned, I got my machine and we had to leave for Quebec a day or two later. I didn't have a chance to even play with it. When we got back, I just didn't feel like doing much, I was too stressed out and I had too much on my mind with everything that's been going on, I'm sure gore's mentioned something about all that.

    The case that caused the dvd problem was new, that's why it was so odd, then again that store was a pain to deal with, I bought an msi videocard from them, it ran about 15C hotter than it should, idled. I had logs of the issue and yet they refused to do anything about it, they acted like I was crazy for even bringing up the problem. The guy basically told me that it was perfectly normal, even though I had a printout of the manufacturer's specs saying otherwise. In the end, I ended up buying a new card, from a different store. Everytime I'd play a game, the card running hot to begin with was causing hangups.

    I also fried a mobo once, pretty sure I blew a capacitor, judging by the smell that permeated my apartment for the next couple of days. I had no spare hardware to test out the cpu, so I drove the machine to the store where I bought it, since it was still under warranty (well the hardware at least :>) it was an old athlon xp, the ones that had a rep for running hot. It was a 20 minutes drive to the store and by the time I got there, I burnt my fingers removing the cpu from the machine, the white "square" on top was melted, there was 3 techs in the store at the time, plus me, and all 4 of us were sure the cpu was fried, yet after the guy threw it in their test rig, it booted up just fine, and it worked for years after that.

    I had a slackware box ages ago that had no sound, no matter what, mind you that was back in the late 90's, so sound was a bit of a pain to begin with back then. One day, I booted up the machine and magically had sound, to this day, I have no idea how that one happened. The only ways to get sound working back then, as far as I can remember, was either your card was supported by the kernel, or you'd have to use OSS. My card wasn't supported. I hadn't updated anything, and all of a sudden I had sound. It drove me nuts for a week or so, then I figured oh well, at least I have sound, who cares why.

    I've given up on windows error messages a long time ago, I find that if you actually look them up, they usually make the problem seem worse than it actually is. That's if they give you any info at all, but that BSOD, to me, was odd because it was just too short, I'd never seen one that short.

    I've set windows updates to ask before even downloading anything. After the crash and the other issues I've had with it before, I'm done with automatic updates. One night it randomly rebooted my machine in the middle of a WoW raid, that was pretty annoying, but at least I wasn't healing at the time.

    I'm still kicking myself for even making that phone call, I really should have known better, but I needed an outlet for my anger at the time and it at least accomplished something, it made me angry enough to fix the problem :>
    Out there in the darkness, they're coming after me, a thousand stalking zombies, they want my brains to feed.

  9. #29
    Senior Member IKnowNot's Avatar
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    Sorry for your troubles, and sorry I missed this one.

    Have you thought to save a few bucks on an external and just buy another internal ?

    Then shut off those useless restore points, and setup Win7 Pro Backup to the new drive.

    When Sp1 fubar-ed my wife’s machine I just ran the AVG Rescue CD, went into utilities, then Midnight Commander ( MC ... that disk is Linux based!)
    Only needed to copy her e-mail folder and a few others that were created after the last backup to a usb. Reinstalled the last backup, replaced the copied files, and told Win7 to ignore Sp1. DONE!
    " And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be" --Miguel Cervantes

  10. #30
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    I agree with Opus00, just set your hard drive as the slave to another system, or if you have an unused HDD then install Windows on that and have it as the master. Then simply copy your files to the good drive.

    Another choice is this. I know this tactic works with Vista to Windows 7 but it may be too risky to try it vice versa. When I installed Windows 7 I did not format the drive and all my Vista files were stored in C:\windows.old.

    Finally, if you sort it out your system and can't find your important files then there is a free recovery tool that is very effective in restoring lost files. Can't remember the name of it but it's there on google somewhere.

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