Windows 7 Won't boot

This is a ****ing Nightmare... My Wife was using Her Computer earlier, and was simply playing a game. She said that a Windows Update popped up in the bottom right corner of the screen as it has a million times before, and that two minutes later, the machine's Screen went Blue.

I thought BSOD, but She said this one was different. She said that it was a very short Hex Code compared to normal, without info, and then, once rebooted, it started up like normal, and then, when it got passed the Motherboard's screen to get to BIOS and so on, it shows a Black Screen that says "Windows is loading Files" and then you get to the Recovery screen.

You can't apparently get to a Desktop no matter what, and it says it's trying to fix the Computer, but it can't. It just does this over and over and over again. No matter how many things I've tried, it's the SAME thing, and it's seriously driving me crazy at this point.

Normally I'd just say **** it and reinstall Windows fresh and be done with it, however, there is stuff on that Hard Drive we CAN'T lose.

My Wife had gotten some VERY important Data on the Computer, and because of everything that has been going on, we couldn't make a back up yet. So, there is VERY important Data on the drive we need to get to, or somehow get the Data onto my FTP Server, or another External HD, anything, so that the OS can be reinstalled finally.

I've been googling and reading for HOURS at this point, and I've found plenty of posts from others about this issue, and yet to find something that will work.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...f-9fbaf6a064a3

That is one of the hundreds of forums I've found with people who've had this problem.

If I look at the little "log" when it fails to repair Windows, it was saying "StartUpRepairOffline " and basically, if you put the Windows 7 Recovery CD the Computer came with in and boot from that, I can't seem to do anything except load the same Recovery Console that loads when you reboot the machine anyway.

When you press the Power Button to turn it on, it will start up, and once you get passed the spot where you can go into BIOS, where normally it would start loading Windows, it instead says that Windows is loading Files, then you see the screen of Windows loading, and it drops you straight to a Recovery Console.

I've tried Restore Points. So far, 14 times. The Restore does NOT work, and even though it says "All System Files have been reverted back to the way they were on this date" once I reboot, it goes RIGHT back to that ****ing Recovery Console.

I'm currently looking for a Bootable CD I can burn that will let me make an Archive of everything on the Hard Drive, and then, use an FTP Client that will let me upload everything to another machine so I'll at least have the Data needed. There's a LOT of Data we need off that machine, and so basically I have to figure out a way to do that.

My Wife was also thinking of trying to find a Bootable CD that would shrink the Hard Drive's Partitions, make a new one, move the Data to that, and then Reinstall Windows 7, and then grab everything from the Partition, but I'm thinking if there's a Rescue CD, or something, that will let me make an Archive of all the Data I need, and then, have an FTP Client, I can just boot from the CD, make the archives, and upload them over FTP to my Server, and then reinstall Windows, and once that's done, grab everything.

God this is a Nightmare...... Has ANYONE ever seen this fixed before? I found one web site for Windows 7 that said to open the Command Prompt, make some back ups of the Registry, and then copy them over and that would work, but once I did it, it just continued doing this.

So that didn't work at all. Using Windows Restore, doesn't work either.

The thing that's REALLY pissing me off other than how this seems almost impossible to fix, is that every time I see someone talking about it, and that they are having the same problem, they all say it started after a Windows Update Popped up on the bottom right of the screen.

I also saw a few people say that it's actually caused by something from that update. I don't have a link or any form of knowing if that's accurate, but it seems that EVERY forum I've looked though for answers says that it starts from this Windows Update. If so, I can't understand how Microsoft would fix this. You can't use FTP from the Command Prompt or Id' have uploaded everything by now, and there seems to be no Network connection with the Command Prompt, so other than bootable CDs with a patch, I don't even know how they would fix this.

Anyway, like I said, the message says "StartUpRepairOffline" and if you google that, you'll get a BUNCH of results, mostly from forums, and you'll see a BUNCH of people saying "Try this" and "Well if that didn't work, try this" and you'll see the person who made the thread replying over and over again that none of it works.

I'd seriously appreciate if anyone knows how to fix this problem.... As I said, there is some VERY important stuff on that drive, so I have to somehow get the Data, and just wow is this driving me crazy.

So far I haven't found a way to fix it, so also, if you know of any good Bootable CDs that have a way to read the NTFS Partitions on the machine, and would allow me to make an Archive of the Data on it, and ALSO contain an FTP Client I could use to upload everything, that would help some too.

I also found this article as well:

http://helpdesk.computercentral-inc....kbarticleid=17

I haven't tried that yet, but looking at it, I'm not sure about it. I have not slept much, and mentally I'm drained from this. But anyway, again, if anyone knows a way to fix this, or a good bootable CD that will let me make some Archives so I can get the Data from the drive, that would be nice.

What happens when you mash the F8 key straight after the BIOS menu dissapears? It should give you an option to boot into Safemode etc?

have you tried booting up from a LiveCD? If you have a spare hard drive you can mount that as "Slave" and manually copy your important data onto then burn onto blank DVD / CDR's

what version of windows7 ? and is it SP1 ?

Slave the drive on another system and copy your data, then rebuild

Safemode doesn't work either. My first thought was "OK, I'll boot safemode, try to fix it, and go from there" but then, I realized the extent of the horror that is....Well, whatever it's called.

I literally spent two full hours on Google reading posts and articles about this problem, and I still haven't found a fix for it, or much of anything where someone has managed to do anything other than reinstall.

It's weird to me... I haven't EVER come across a software issue no one could fix, I mean, it's software. I admit that there's been a few times where I'd get pissed off at a Windows problem and format and reinstall, but those times, it was just faster than the fix. But this one.... I don't get it.

I've kept going on my quest, and now it's been 4 and a half hours, and so far, what I've found is this:

The issue seems to happen because of a Windows Update. Which I find to be weird because I know they DO do a QA on these things.... But every time I've read about someone who had this problem, it was right after a Windows Update popped up. And, usually within minutes of it happening.

The issue basically creates a situation where you can't get Windows to boot at all. It will literally just sit there and load the Recovery Console over and over and over again.

I saw ONE person say "That fixed it!" but when someone else who had it happen asked them to reply with what they did to get it to work again, they never replied. So I don't know what that magic fix was.

The Windows Recovery Console that loads, can't fix the problem. It can't even find it.... It says that it couldn't find any problems and to contact your system admin...

I found the one article that said when it happened, you had to fix the registry by hand, and then gave step by step instructions. I didn't see anyone saying that helped them, and when I did it, I did it exactly as told, but it didn't fix it. It worked, and I copied over the required files, and did exactly what I was supposed to do, but, it didn't work.

I'm about to burn a bootable CD of this:

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?dis...n=systemrescue

If that works as it's supposed to, I should be able to make archives of the Data I need, and then use the FTP client it has to upload the Data to my FTP Server.

The reason I haven't simply hooked it up as a Slave, is that the Computer is brand new, and it's the only one we have access to that uses SATA. So I can't actually do that sadly. A lot of my machines are pretty old and that's the newest machine we have. So I can't really just pop the drive into something else and grab everything from it. Which sucks because that would probably take all of an hour to do too...

So basically, I'm going to burn the Rescue CD I linked to, and Hope to God that it actually works. It says it has a bunch of tools for Windows and Linux, and that it has tools for Partitions as well, and also a bunch of Compression and Archiving tools, and it has Networking, so, it should allow me to grab all the Data I need to keep, and then make Archives of it all, and then upload those to my Server, and from there, download them onto this machine which has the biggest HD, and delete the one from the Server so I can upload another. The reason for that, is that the HD is 500 GBs, and I don't have that much space in my Server. It's something I put together with the 43 GB HD the machine came with, and the 110 GB drive I installed, so I'll probably be working on this a while.

The Operating System, is Windows 7 Home Premium, and I don't think Service Pack 1 is installed.

Thanks for replying. This has been driving me nuts as I said. Would be nice if we'd been able to actually make some back ups, because I'd have just formated the ****er and reinstalled Windows, but sadly, there's a lot of stuff on there, and none of it was backed up.

Anyway, if anyone finds anything or knows anything, feel free to respond. I still have no idea how a Microsoft Update Notification could cause all this, and I've been looking for over 4 hours now.

By the way; I saw a few people saying on some of those forums that if the Windows DVD was damaged it wouldn't work, and to always check with a bootable CD to rule that out, and I did that as well.

I popped in Disk 1 of Slackware 13.37 and it booted right up just fine. So I know that not only is the Microsoft DVD working fine, but that the DVD drive allows you to boot from it just fine too.

The link I saw was here, and I don't know how this worked out. Hardware has not ever been my strong point, but I do have a basic understanding of Hardware....Well, enough to get by most of the time anyway. I don't build my own Computers or anything. Operating Systems was always my thing, but GOD I Hate Hardware sometimes.

This is the post I saw where someone actually said they got it working again:

http://www.techsupportforum.com/foru...ne-497639.html

He didn't ever reply to say which thing worked right and considering that this machine is literally Brand New, and only a few months old, and isn't really used for number crunching, I really don't think the HD is going already. And I did check to see how the HD sounds, and that sounded normal, and disk Operations weren't "weird" or anything, and according to the scan I ran, it's supposed to be working fine. And I kind of assumed that if the DVD drive was the issue, it wouldn't allow me to boot from it with two different OSs.

Load up a LiveCD, use Gparted to shrink the partition enough so you can slap a basic OS install, install the OS and then use .isoburn or manually copy everything needed onto your FTP server.

ubuntu have a 600mb liveCD that comes with gparted.

Well, right now, I just finished burning the ISO of that SystemRescue thing I found, and it has Gparted as well. I'm not sure if I've ever actually used Gparted, but I know what it is.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?dis...n=systemrescue

It seems to have quite a bit of tools I could use. My Plan is to basically pop that in, boot from that, and once I have it running, make an Archive of the stuff I need, and then start uploading it.

I'll probably make a few Archives, because the size of the stuff I need to grab is pretty big, so I'm thinking it'll be a lot easier, and I won't risk filling any HDs up, if I just make more than one, and then label them based on what is there.

Once I have the Archives made, I can start uploading them, as it says it comes with an FTP Client, so I can use that to upload Archives of back ups to my Server, and then from there, I can use this machine, to grab the Archive, and once it's on here, delete it from the Server so I'll have enough space to keep uploading new ones.

I logged into my Server and made some space ready, but unless I want to delete everything I have, which still wouldn't probably be enough space, I'll have to do it this way.

So I'm going to get ready to boot the CD, and see if I can FINALLY grab the Data from the drive, and upload it to the FTP Server, and then grab it on this machine which has a bigger drive, and then, once I have all the Archives, I was thinking of using Gparted anyway to shrink the Partition and make a new one anyway, because then I can put Data on a different Partition, and then do a Format and fresh install of Windows 7 on the Computer.

I Hope to God this works and doesn't take 5 hours. I just can't Believe it all seems to happen from a Windows Update though. If you google the error I posted about, basically, you get a bunch of Forum Posts about it, and then a few articles here and there that talk about it, and all of them seem to say that there is a Windows Update that pops up, and then this happens.

I don't quite understand that at all, I mean, how would a Windows Update pop up on the screen totally screw a machine like that? I haven't ever even heard of this before.

I can't even verify what update it was, or, if that's the true cause, but out of all those posts, it was the only thing that happened that the other people said happened right before this started.

It's weird, and I hate it. I just want the Computer working again with all the Data back on it.

Makes it hard without an exact error code. :)

This may really break the OS, but if your able to drop into a Dos-Prompt copy NTFS.sys from CD over to c:\windows

quit the dos session, reboot and cross them fingers. :D

Yup, sure does. Would have been nice if there had been one. Then I could have googled that error to see if there was something else I could do.

I wasn't in the room when it happened, but my Wife has two degrees in Computer Science, is better with Hardware than I am by far, a WAY better coder, knows Assembler, and I dare say probably better with Unix too. She's been using Unix longer than I have, and She's very intelligent.

When I asked just to be sure about the screen, She said that it looked like a BSOD, except, as She said; "You know how a Blue Screen normally has a bunch of text on it with an error message and some other info?" And I said yes, and She said "This one didn't".... She had run a Virus Scan literally like 12 hours earlier, and wasn't doing anything other than playing a game, and then, She saw a Windows Update pop up in the lower right side of the screen.

Two Minutes later, the machines crashes, She reboots, and it looks different from a usual boot; She can see it's saying "Windows is loading files" on a black screen, and then, it goes straight to the Recovery Console, and says it's checking for errors.

It then says it can't find any errors, and basically, you can either click on the advanced menu, or, you can reboot. Rebooting simply starts this process over again, as it doesn't ever seem to stop, and, the advanced menu, is basically where you have about 5 options. The first one, is the one that fails when this starts up, and then you have Restore stuff, which also won't work at all. I know, I've tried restoring to different points 14 times now, and not once did it work.

Then you have the Memory Test, and not much else other than a command prompt.

The Command Prompt starts out with an "X:" menu, and from there you can change to the C and D drives and all that, but, you can't get to Windows, and there isn't any Network. Which blows, because it would have made this a lot easier.

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Originally Posted by gore

The Command Prompt starts out with an "X:" menu, and from there you can change to the C and D drives and all that, but, you can't get to Windows, and there isn't any Network. Which blows, because it would have made this a lot easier.

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Get into that menu, and try

cd c:\

then

fixmbr

then

fixboot

also try chkdisk /F

I'm not sure if it can be run in safe mode but get bluescreenview and run the .exe (no need to install) it'll tell you what all your BSOD's are. just double click the pink line and save it to a text doc and upload it here.


from what I gather it may well be a hardware driver issue.
follow this suggestion:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...b-f2efbba1dcbf

The fixmbr and fixboot don't run, and say they aren't recognized, and for the chkdsk, I got the same error someone on a forum had gotten where it said "failed to transfer log messages to the event log with status 50".

This is.... It's got to be the weirdest problem I've ever seen. I've worked on Computers a lot, and not once have I ever seen something like this where you can't even use a Recovery.

But yea, the fixmbr, and fixboot wouldn't run. Also, something that I'm not sure is related; It says drive "D" is the one with the Windows installation, and not C. Now, I don't remember Honestly if that's just how it was when it was purchased or not, but if I go to drive C (Which I first tried doing with cd C:, and it wouldn't work, but typing C: and hitting enter did....) But anyway, when I first did that, I went to type dir, and it wouldn't let me view anything.

When I typed d: and hit Enter, I did a "dir" on it, and it showed me the root directory with all the program files folders, and everything you'd normally see in the C: Drive. I just thought that was weird too, but it may very well have been set up that way so I can't say it is for sure related.

The link you posted, shows a message very similar to the one I get, but the one I'm getting says "Corrupt File" instead of bad driver. Of course it doesn't say what file, or give me an option to put the Windows Installation DVD in the drive and copy it over to replace it, but it says there is a Corrupt File.

is the machine using a pci / agp type graphics card or an on-board card?

Is it as simple as Command line remove the latest windows update KB?????
Whatever number it is.

Gore.

Here is something i learned on AO.
Partition the drive on setup.

ALWAYS save wanted files to D: Drive (In your case C drive by the look of it).
Then if any virus attacks windows or any update kills windows all your files in D drive are untouched and if a re install is needed on C: windows you can do it easily.
Anything gets corrupted on C....Wipe and start again.

I have saved over 10 years of files by doing this.(ghosted to new hard drive a few years ago)
Can't think of how many times i have had to wipe C but i have never lost anything in D drive.

Lessons are learned!

Just an update -

So far, I've gotten the CD to boot, and I'm currently copying the files I need to a folder on the HD as I got write access from NTFS-3g, so I'm copying files I need into a folder, and then I'm gonna grab them, as I'm able to use a USB drive, so it'll take forever but it should work.

My Wife is on the phone with Microsoft tech support, which, the web site gave us a wrong number apparently, but then the guy with the accent gave us another number to call, which was the ****ing Windows Product key activation number, and now is talking to someone who we got palmed off to from someone else who said this is a known issue so the tech support will be free..... Wow...

I will take a stab at saying the MBR sector is toast, as you say the fixmbr / fixboot was not recognised
new HDD, once you get this sorted
but as HDD - in my scenario - is bolloxed, you may need to grab a SATA to IDE converter plug, it just plugs into SATA drive
and makes it IDE
then slave it to grab data
MS update had that one feck up a while back
you had to remove the old update to clear fault
but again, everything you have posted points to a fecked drive
probably a coincidence the PC fell over then
but worth checking once data is secured

then, as Info Au said, partition your drives before you ever use PC

Well, I have another update, and, since I have a little more time, I can go into more detail:

First; The Microsoft tech support....I remember back when I first got into Unix based OSs, I was looking up some Linux / BSD / Unix Humor, and one of them was a web site that was basically a mix of quotes, and some jokes, about Windows, and I was reading it.

Well, one of the lines on that page was about Microsoft tech support, and how in most cases, if they don't have a really simple fix, they tell you to reinstall the OS.

I'd never had any experience with it personally, because the very first time I ever called tech support, was because my ISP was screwing up and I called them. The second time I ever called, was because a Windows Authentication wouldn't work in XP like two years ago, and today, my Wife called, and this was after I had to lookup the phone number and try multiple settings on their site to get a damn phone number.

The guy who answered finally, said it was customer service even though the site said it was tech support, and he gave a number for support, which turned out to be the stupid Windows Product Key line... So we were given ANOTHER phone number.

I don't know who this girl was, but she was NOT qualified to do that job.... My Wife was on the phone for an hour and a half, and at one point, she said "What directory are You in?" and my Wife told her, and she said to do "cd .." and then "cd Windows".... Which put my Wife in the directory She was in before....

The woman seemed to be on google trying to find a solution, because every time she said something, it was something I had tried a few hours earlier. Then she said to try the last thing I had tried before giving up, and I was like OMG....

The woman said she couldn't help, and she kept putting my Wife on hold to "Check for someone who might be able to help" and of course, she couldn't.

So basically she said that she couldn't help, and we would have to reinstall the OS.... From what I saw on Google, it was possible to fix this issue, but no one actually posted how.

I grabbed a Rescue CD, and booted from that. I did a check on the HD, and it said everything was OK, no bad sectors, nothing. From what I read on Google, and from what the girl on tech support said, the reason it happened, was that Windows Update corrupted a file.

I couldn't Believe it... She had managed to "find some commands" that would reveal some info about the Operating System, and what had happened, and basically, when Windows update grabbed the installation for a patch, it started to install, and while messing with some critical system files, it failed.

When it failed, it corrupted a file, and did this... I saw the message that it was a corrupted file and then girl on the phone said that it was a known issue. Since it was a "known issue" we "didn't have to pay for the call".... Couldn't Believe it.

According to the tests that were ran, the hardware itself is fine, but because of one update that auto downloaded itself and then crashed the machine, it started a mess.

I don't even remember which update it was, but basically, they said they knew about it, and that during the update process, Windows Update starts to change some important ****, and then screws up, fails, and the machine can't boot Windows anymore. And since the Windows Recovery Console can't find it, as it's basically one portion, it can't be fixed through that, so you have to reinstall.

The woman on the phone had us try Restore points again, which of course didn't work. I couldn't remember exactly which system files were corrupted, but Windows Update will basically fail as it's doing this, and winload.exe or something like that, gets corrupted. Like I said; I can't remember the exact name of it, but it's something similar to "Winload" or something like that, and it was corrupted during the update when it failed, and then, Windows can no longer load.

I can't Believe they couldn't find a way to get this thing from the Windows Disc.... I mean, I thought it would be copying a file, or a few of them, from the CD, and then rebooting, and it would be finished. But apparently you can't do that, which is REALLY stupid....

I'm exhausted. I've been up for a REALLY long time, and I didn't sleep very well yesterday either, so, basically, I barely slept, and then on top of that, I've been up for a really long time. So my thought process is really messed up right now, and it's hard to type this post in a legible manner.

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.

Check PMs.

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 :eek:

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 :D

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

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?

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Originally Posted by nihil

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?

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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 :eek:, to give you the additional security too :cool:

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.

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.

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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

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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 :D

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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.

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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. :D

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 ;)

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 :>

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!

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.

You have had 10 years to get used to Windows XP............and support stops January 2014. :eek:

Windows 8 will be released by then, so you might try get on the beta testing programme ............... a good way to learn IMO. ;) I did beta testing for Windows 7.

Everyone I know that has moved from XP to Windows 7 likes Windows 7 and doesn't want to go back. That was certainly NOT the case with Vista!

I think that the only reason to stick with XP would be if you have legacy support issues or you are running on very old equipment.

I have Windows 7 64bit running on a laptop with 3GB of DDR2/800 RAM, onboard graphics, and a 2.1GHz dual core processor, and it runs just fine. I have worked on a couple of similar boxes and the experience was equally impressive. Damn thing is so good my wife has confiscated it, and she is an XP user at work.

On the other hand, I have Vista 32bit running on a 2.17GHz single core with 1.5GB of DDR1/400 & 333MHz RAM [Via VT400 chipset? it takes 400 in slot 0 and 333 in the other two] and a dedicated ATI graphics card with 256MB of DDR2 RAM. It pretty much runs like a dog, even with all the eye candy, bells, and whistles turned off.

XP runs far better on machines of a lesser specification it would seem, although I haven't tried Windows 7 on a single core setup.............yet.:lildevil:

I also don't believe that XP properly recognises and uses multicore processors in general computer use. Sure games, CAD, and graphics packages will do it, as they usually take over from the OS.

If you think about it, XP is a 2001 OS and IIRC multicores didn't hit the streets 'til 2003, and then only in servers. You didn't really see them in quantity until late 2005/early 2006 when Vista was due out.

I know that AMD have a program that is supposed to improve XP's performance with their multicores, and that Microsoft have one for Intel platforms. I would say that both of these are frigs rather than fixes. :D

I did read a little while ago that Microsoft had announced Windows 7 TPC ("Thin PC") edition, which is supposed to let businesses continue with older hardware, amongst other things, like promoting Office 365?:cool:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/...-thin-pcs/8657

I would guess that they will do the same for Windows 8, which I don't expect to be any more demanding from a hardware viewpoint, or complexity of the UI.

PS. Why am I getting this distinct aroma of SPAM??????????? and USA is USA, not usa, unless you would like me to spell china like that? :p