Daft question I know it wont work but i'm desperate

[Michael Pooley]

I re-installed win 7 on a new SSD and after the first time I turned it off it said it was downloading 137 updates!
next morning it started up and kept rebooting in an endless loop.

I got out the cd and went into repair after several botched attempts this worked!
I carried on adding my programs and had endless problems with them especially sql server,Visual studio etc
god know how many hours it's taken me, including the original 137 updates and at least a further 70 updates
and I set up my backups using shadow protect without noticing that thereare two extra partitions on this drive.
One is a Fat32 bootmanager partition and the other one is marked unknown!

So I then realise all my backups are useless as shadowprotect will only do 1 partition at a time but there are 3

I did try restoring the image of the win partition back to another drive but it won't boot,
I then tried restoring all 3 partitions to the other drive one at a time and that wont boot either so now I am completely stumped.
.
I dont want to do any more work on this install without being able to ever make a working image.

so my crazy idea and yes I do know it's crazy but...

what if i do a fresh install of win7 on an empty drive and then copy the whole contents of this working copy that i have spent so much time on over the top of the fresh install ?

I assume there might be permission problems there is always something! but is it worth a try?

anyone have any better ideas please?

thanks for reading this far lol


Mike

 

[clifford_cooley]

what if i do a fresh install of win7 on an empty drive and then copy the whole contents of this working copy that i have spent so much time on over the top of the fresh install ?

That would also copy the issue you are currently having.

Press F8 during boot and try "Last known good configuration".
Afterward if that doesn't work try booting into Safe Mode and using a restore point.
And if that fails, try installing Windows again to correct any issues. Your files and apps should be fine as long as you do the in-place install.

Wish I could say for sure one of these three would work. But unfortunately they are only ideas I might try for myself if ever I encountered this problem.

 

[Michael Pooley]

thanks for your reply
but I think you misunderstand,I can boot into windows ok ! my problem is these extra partitions that stop the backup and restore working.
One of the things I want to do is to transfer this new copy of windows on to my larger SSD. I was going ot get this new copy working properly before I did that.
Normally using Shadowprotect this is easy, just make an image and do a recovery to the new drive but this wont work because of these two unnecessary partition's

I did try another fresh install last night on an old drive but that crashed and when I went to the windows dvd and tried to do a repair I got a message saying "you are trying to repair a different version of windows than is on this disk" I also tried a windows recovery disk I had made from the linhk in windows and this then told me it was not a bootable disk !!! I hate windows !!!!

thanks

 

[TrainableMan]

I believe you will need to reinstall but I was wondering if your installation DVD is W7 or W7 SP1-U?
If your DVD is not SP1 then you could probably save a lot of those updates by downloading and burning a W7 SP1 DVD and installing from that instead.

You can find links to W7 SP1-U (media refresh) ISO HERE.

 

[Sapper44]

I have a SSD drive have had a few problems on boot.One the setting in bios was not set to ACHI it was set to IDE.Dont know how it happened but I often have updates when I shut down.I have also taken the battery out of motherboard to reset bios dont know if these will apply to your problem.

 

[pcspeak]

I had a similar problem.
I downloaded the Gparted ISO from here and burned it to a CD.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted/gparted-0.17.0/
Booted from the CD and used Gparted to create a single NTFS formatted partition using ALL the SSD.
You'll need to delete any partitions currently on the drive first.
Then I installed Windows 7 to that partition from the DVD.