Hard drive problems

[Michael Perkins]

Ok, I have a problem that I have literally exhausted all available options to me, so I need the advice of someone that's a lot more knowledgeable than I am.

Two days ago while my father was using my PC he had a dialogue come up that said the system needed to restart for updates to be installed. He clicked the restart button and the computer never came back on.

I spent an entire day trying to find out what the issue was, and came to find that almost the entire boot folder was being listed as unreadable and corrupt. I have tried using the Windows 7 recovery tools, the expanded tools available on the install cd, and I have even gone through the process of rebuilding the boot files through the command prompt.

Nothing else on the hard drive is having any issues at all. all the files and programs are still there, but Windows will not load at all. It keeps stating that bootmgr is missing.

I have researched what is going on extensively, and I have tried everything I can think of, and I even found that even a clean install of the operating system may not work.

I thought this might be some type of virus, as the only files that seem to giving me issues are the ones located in the boot section of the Windows folder, but now I am worried that it might be a hardware issue.

I was thinking about taking a hard drive out of an older computer and using that one and doing a clean install of windows on that one and using my old drive as data storage, but I am not sure if that is even viable. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[popatim]

I would ask you to backup your important files first.
Have you run startup repair? You may need to run it up to 3 times. Have all other drives disconnected, including usb drives.

After that if you still can't boot then boot to a command prompt and run bootrec /fixboot

It will return telling you if it was successful or not. If it was then reboot. if not then run chksk /r C: (replace C: with whatever drive letter is assigned to your hdd)

Let us know how that goes. Theres more we can do but the main thing is to get your data off safely FIRST.

 

[Michael Perkins]

I would ask you to backup your important files first.
Have you run startup repair? You may need to run it up to 3 times. Have all other drives disconnected, including usb drives.

After that if you still can't boot then boot to a command prompt and run bootrec /fixboot

It will return telling you if it was successful or not. If it was then reboot. if not then run chksk /r C: (replace C: with whatever drive letter is assigned to your hdd)

Let us know how that goes. Theres more we can do but the main thing is to get your data off safely FIRST.

I am waiting to get a hold of a USB drive in order to transfer anything important, but I have run startup repair several times, and I have gone through /fixboot, /fixmbr, and several others that are recommended from the command prompt. I should also note that every single time I load the repair or installation fix and the OS files are being searched, it constantly tells me that boot files are corrupt and unreadable.

I was almost thinking of taking my old hard drive out of my old PC and doing a clean install of Windows on that one, and using the old one as a data drive, but I do not know if there would be any conflicts.

 

[Michael Perkins]

Yeah, I think I have pretty much settled on saving what personal files I can from the messed up drive and then trying to either do a clean install on that one, or getting a smaller drive to use as the new boot drive.

 

[Michael Perkins]

Ok, so I tried installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 on the drive, and I keep getting error messages that are interrupting the install. On the tools section of the install disk, there is an option to completely format the drive. Would that work?

Also, I have another PC that contain the same version of windows on it's drive. I know I would run into issues if I just popped that one in without doing a fresh install, but would I have issues if I made that one the primary with a fresh install and used the old one as data? Would the windows install on the old one interfere with anything?