Need Help: SAS Sys Drive W7 - recover PST and Mozilla Bkmarks

[tryagainplease]

How it happened. Sick for a month w/ Flu, so I did a lot of research on another medical condition I have. About 3 days ago I noticed my computer had shut down while I was away.

I thought it may have been a power failure so I did the usual, first tried to run ChkDsk, but it would not run or allow me to set it up to run on reboot. Then I checked the Event log. A lot of red alerts over a 3 day prior period but none I could understand and none that indicated the system drive.

I really didn’t back up my 2 files but I should have before proceeding.

I then ran restore point back to 12/28 but it failed and dumped me into the windows repair utility. I ran the windows repair utility and it indicated that “windows will not start, does not have a valid partition table, repaired successfully”.

But windows still would not start. I have read many articles advising what to do and I ran the fixmbr.exe which reported “success”.

Now I am in a reboot loop which takes me back to the repair utility and my choices are to 1) run the repair utility, or 2) start windows normally. I have run the repair utility multiple times both with the onboard repair and an external repair disk. Same result as above every time.

When I select option2, start windows normally here’s what happens: normal boot routine for the motherboard, memcheck ok, mobo finds the SAS drive ok, windows reports “starting windows”, and I see the 4 banner red-green-blue-yellow banner, hard drive sounds normal – lots of disk access, then black screen with system light still on.

I have wished many times I had never taken up the SAS drive. It was my attempt to build a dream machine which would be super fast. It has been nothing but a heartbreak. Installation of the SAS drivers was very difficult, poor documentation, but finally with the help I found on the forums found an install process that worked. Final insult, the SAS drive never gave me the performance I expected. At the time I should have just bought the WD Raptor SATA at 10k rpms which was a good drive. Appreciate any suggestions from the group. Many thanks.

Here’s my system specs: I built this box in 2009 when the first i7 920 was available:
P6T6-WS-ASUS-Revolution
Intel i7 – 920
15k SAS Fujitsu system drive
Corsair PSU HX1000
Graphic Card: GIGABYTE GV-R485MC-1GI Radeon HD 4850 1GB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0
6 GB RAM: OCZ Platinum 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
CM Storm Scout case

 

[RealBeast]

Having had many many painful computer experiences, I feel your pain, but that is what you learn from so look at the bright side.

At this point I would attempt a Windows 7 repair install as described in detail HERE, and of course have your SAS drivers latest stable version available for F6 install when needed early in the install. If the repair install works it will save all of your data and programs, the only downside is you need to redo all Windows updates.

If your install disk is not SP1, you will need to download a legit iso image of your specific Windows 7 version in SP1 from DIGITAL RIVER, as you cannot do a repair on an SP1 installation with a pre-SP1 install disk.

edit: and if you want to turn it back into a dream from a nightmare machine, get a good 256Gb SSD and use the SAS for data.

 

[tryagainplease]

Having had many many painful computer experiences, I feel your pain, but that is what you learn from so look at the bright side.

At this point I would attempt a Windows 7 repair install as described in detail HERE, and of course have your SAS drivers latest stable version available for F6 install when needed early in the install. If the repair install works it will save all of your data and programs, the only downside is you need to redo all Windows updates.

If your install disk is not SP1, you will need to download a legit iso image of your specific Windows 7 version in SP1 from DIGITAL RIVER, as you cannot do a repair on an SP1 installation with a pre-SP1 install disk.

edit: and if you want to turn it back into a dream from a nightmare machine, get a good 256Gb SSD and use the SAS for data.

Thanks, RealBeast, I was running out of options. And yes, I built a new box with a Gigabyte mobo and an SSD drive. I have thought about replacing the SAS with an SSD but first things first I need to try and recover my 2 files if at all possible. Thanks again..... I will be back here after I run down the suggested fix. I don't think my original disk had Sp1. Thanks for the links too.

 

[tryagainplease]

Best answer selected by tryagainplease.