Diskpart disk and volume labels after BSOD

[NeuralNet88]

Hi, I already posted in the motherboard section about a problem I was having after installing a new graphics card. I've been going through different options of what my problem could be, which is a bsod that says inaccessible boot device that then does the restart loop to advance startup options menu. I used the command prompt to run diskpart and found it listed as below:

Volume ### LTR Label Fs type size status info
Volume 0 F dvd-rom 0 b no media
Volume 1 C System Res NTFS partition 100mb healthy
volume 2 D NTFS partition 930gb healthy
volume 3 E NTFS partition 450mb healthy hidden

It goes on to list 3 partitions which are primary for the first two, recovery for the 3rd one.
1st size and offset respectively is 100mb and 1024kb, second is 930gb and 101mb, 3rd is 450mb and 931gb. As you can tell it doesn't list any as the OS or boot volume or partition just what i would imagine is system reserved for volume 1.

Isn't it supposed to even in the recovery prompt? Also the main volume is under Drive D and not C(this is a custom made computer). Could this be the cause of inaccessible boot device or am I missing something?

Thank you for any help.

 

[johnbl]

your drive letters have been reassigned.
your windows is on drive d now.
in diskpart.exe
list disk ; to show the disks.
select disk 0 ; the one where your volume 1 is listed as c drive
list volume ; just to confirm you have the correct drive
select volume 1 ; this is the currently incorrectly assigned drive c
assign letter=g ; this will give the small partition a new drive letter g and free drive c so it can be reassigned.
select volume 2 ; this is where your windows is currently stored on drive d
assign letter=c ; this will mark the volume 2 to be drive c.

exit ; this should exit the diskpart.exe program.

you might also do the same thing using
the bootrec.exe commands.
basically you would boot up the repair disk command prompt and run
bootrec.exe /scanos (this should scan your drives for windows directories)
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /rebuildBCD

generally I would just run all of the commands and try to boot again.
each command does a different thing but running all of them should not hurt anything.

normally the reserve partitions are not given a drive letter but sometimes when you add extra disks or plug in a bootable USB thumb drive the assignments conflict and windows re assigns all of the drive letters.
generally, the fist drive detected gets drive c: the second one gets drive d then it starts to assign the secondary partitions on the first drive and it gets drive e. (often it is the windows partition that should be drive c)

I would guess the port and controller that the drive is on would determine which drive is assigned first. It gets kind of screwy when you add in USB drives.

 

[NeuralNet88]

I went into command prompt and did bootrec /scanos first to see if any windows installations were on there. The only thing it came up with was the windows old folder for windows 7 after you upgrade to windows 10 on the D drive. I knew that switching letters wouldn't work but I tried it anyway and sure enough it gave the BSOD again.

So apparently something has happened to where windows 10 is no longer on my computer at all it would seem. What do I do now?

I figured this might be the problem since after trying to disable fast boot through the powercfg utility it came up with an error message saying that hibernation was not supported by windows during the upgrade process.

 

[johnbl]

is there a temp windows install directory like:
$Windows.~BT

if your problems happened during the upgrade I would try to boot off of the windows 10 image and see if the roll back to a previous windows version works. I have not rolled back a machine that never completed a upgrade.
I would generally just do a clean install of windows 10 rather than dink with the old install. Just depends on what special software was installed on the windows 7 image.
when you have the repair command prompt you can attempt to see the hidden files on each of the assigned drives.
for example you can run
c:
attrib /s *.*
and it will show the hidden files and directories.
if windows 10 was installed somewhere the install will have used a bunch of disk space even if it is in a hidden directory.

generally, I would not expect this problem unless you were running some certain 3rd party tools under windows 7.

 

[NeuralNet88]

If I wanted to go back to windows 7 just in case, what would I have to do? Also would a system restore work from a restore point about 5 days ago when I first booted the computer on, or just a system image?

Like I said, the computer hadn't been on in 6 months or so and I think my roommate had just put windows 10 on before he turned it off for good. Someone at a local computer shop also told me over the phone, when I mentioned about the monitor turning off but not the system and my roommate forcing shutdown that sometimes that could be the system in contact with microsoft or something and that whenever you add new hardware to your computer, something happens(can't remember exactly) and if you force shutdown during updates, I guess microsoft might think you're pirating or something along those lines. Not sure if that's true or not.

 

[johnbl]

if the compute is 6 months out of date, you will find that the system will just try to install a current build of windows 10. The current builds now require signed drivers and will not load unsigned drivers. Many vendors like Samsung put out drivers that were not correctly signed and the old drivers will not load on current versions. if your machine was updated from windows 7 to windows 10 you can download a clean current windows 10 disk image from the Microsoft servers and just do a clean install. it will pick up the license for your machine that is stored on the Microsoft server.

generally, forcing a shutdown on a machine is a bad idea. Windows only refuses to shutdown when it knows data will be lost. This happens with certain bugs in 3rd party drivers and in cache bugs in hard drives. (lazy writes that do not complete, or BIOS bugs the prevent windows from getting the completion signal) depending what is still stuck in cache you can lose part of a document to even a directory tree on your hard drive.

I would update the BIOS and do a clean install of what ever version of windows you want.
Myself I would get a current windows 10 build so I would not have to do the updates. Or I would download the current windows 7+sp1 and use my key that came with the system (if you have a retail windows 7)
oem windows 7 have different install requirements.

best bet is a current windows 10 + motherboard windows 10 driver updated from the motherboard vendor.
I would not add any 3rd party drivers that replace windows key functions. skip 3rd party defrag programs, partition programs in particular.

 

[NeuralNet88]

With it being my roommates computer, they don't want to do a clean install yet and lose their stuff. Problem is money is tight and we don't have anything on us at the moment that will back our stuff up. Any possible suggestions?

I also talked with a friend of mine who is an IT professional(first time hearing about the problem) and they said that they hope there wasn't a boot sector failure(already tried doing bootrec repair boot and the rest when I got home a few hours ago to no avail) or a virus that had gotten into the system somehow. I did some more stuff in the recovery options including doing a system restore to one of two points(the latest one) and that didn't do anything except take it to the BSOD after finishing. Went back to try the other restore point and it was gone...what happened?

I also ran a quick s.m.a.r.t analysis through the cmd using wmic and it came up ok. I could take out the hard drive and put it on another computer and run some virus scans on it i suppose. I also still haven't flashed the bios yet. I also ran diskpart again and it switches between volumes as the active volume, and sometimes it doesn't list one at all including active disk.

p.s. also forgot to mention that I ran bcdedit /enum to see the status of boot loader and boot manager. The boot manager path wasn't there at all until after system restore try then I believe it was list as C: volume and that was it.

 

[NeuralNet88]

Noob mistake. Didn't realize that the asterisk is where your focus is on when you select disk or select volume.

doh!

 

[NeuralNet88]

is there a temp windows install directory like:
$Windows.~BT

if your problems happened during the upgrade I would try to boot off of the windows 10 image and see if the roll back to a previous windows version works. I have not rolled back a machine that never completed a upgrade.
I would generally just do a clean install of windows 10 rather than dink with the old install. Just depends on what special software was installed on the windows 7 image.
when you have the repair command prompt you can attempt to see the hidden files on each of the assigned drives.
for example you can run
c:
attrib /s *.*
and it will show the hidden files and directories.
if windows 10 was installed somewhere the install will have used a bunch of disk space even if it is in a hidden directory.

generally, I would not expect this problem unless you were running some certain 3rd party tools under windows 7.

Just wanted to reply saying that there is indeed the exact file you mentioned $windows~BT. On volume 2.

Also wanted to add that D is where all the files are instead of C as usual and I ran bcdedit /enum again and came up with boot manager being on C under the path /bootmgr. Windows boot loader is under the \windows\system32\winload.exe as to be expected. Windows 10 is in the description of the boot loader and its under D. Not sure if that means much.

p.s $windows~BT is in the hidden files.

 

[NeuralNet88]

I tried making volume 2 active after reassigning the letters again and that messed up even more. I couldn't access bcdedit or the bcd store through the command prompt so I went back and tried undoing what I did and upon rebooting it only got past the uefi screen to a black screen and said"reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key".

Went into UEFI and noticed that the storage boot was fine.

Update: Time to just do the clean install.

 

[NeuralNet88]

if the compute is 6 months out of date, you will find that the system will just try to install a current build of windows 10. The current builds now require signed drivers and will not load unsigned drivers. Many vendors like Samsung put out drivers that were not correctly signed and the old drivers will not load on current versions. if your machine was updated from windows 7 to windows 10 you can download a clean current windows 10 disk image from the Microsoft servers and just do a clean install. it will pick up the license for your machine that is stored on the Microsoft server.

generally, forcing a shutdown on a machine is a bad idea. Windows only refuses to shutdown when it knows data will be lost. This happens with certain bugs in 3rd party drivers and in cache bugs in hard drives. (lazy writes that do not complete, or BIOS bugs the prevent windows from getting the completion signal) depending what is still stuck in cache you can lose part of a document to even a directory tree on your hard drive.

I would update the BIOS and do a clean install of what ever version of windows you want.
Myself I would get a current windows 10 build so I would not have to do the updates. Or I would download the current windows 7+sp1 and use my key that came with the system (if you have a retail windows 7)
oem windows 7 have different install requirements.

best bet is a current windows 10 + motherboard windows 10 driver updated from the motherboard vendor.
I would not add any 3rd party drivers that replace windows key functions. skip 3rd party defrag programs, partition programs in particular.

Would it be better to instant flash in uefi or go to mobo's website? Right now I guess because of restoring defaults its on version p1.00 and windows only takes 2.0 and above.