[SOLVED] PC With Windows 7 Home Premium Won't Boot Up After Upgrading

[gtrainer]

I inherited a Gateway PC with Windows 7 Home Premium on it. Initially it started up just fine. Then I started updating Windows 7 as it was not updated for a good while. Cut a long story short, Windows would not load after being updated. I suspected it caused a corruption of some kind. I also had a removed a USB drive I had installed which I wondered might have caused an issue.

I tried to resolve it with Windows 7 Recovery tools. Windows Repair just looped endlessly for hours and I got nowhere. I tried System Restore and it told me no restore existed. I burned am .iso CD of Easy Recovery Essentials (EasyRE) and booted from the CD drive and attempted to repair which at that time the result was it could not “….find any valid Windows Partitions on the computer.” Even though when I run the Windows 7 Repair it mentions my “Local Drive D:” I did double check that the hard drive was attached inside the PC. At some point along my travel to troubleshoot, when using the the command line, it mentioned I/O device error.

I’d love to try to boot Windows up again as there are some important documents and precious photos I want to keep. I'm also trying to avoid having to remove the hard drive, etc. Would love assistance on steps I might be missing here to get this machine to boot.

 

[dwd999]

As a last resort, if you have access to another computer, you could download a linux distro (e.g. linux mint mate) and burn it onto a usb drive (e.g. rufus). Then you could try booting from this usb and use the file manager to move the important documents and photos onto an external drive so that at least they are saved. Once you have saved everything you want, you may have no choice other than to wipe the existing drives in the computer and perform a complete windows reinstall.

 

[BFG-9000]

This would've been a handy time to install Windows on top of itself, but unfortunately the ability to do so from bootable install media was removed after XP.
Since Vista, Microsoft engineers decided to only allow this from the desktop of a running PC, and not in safe mode either! And yet it's still called a repair install (or in-place upgrade)

As corruption can often occur with a bad cable or port, use a new cable in a different port, then go back to commandline and see if you can now do the usual sfc /scannow (if it's still registering as the D drive then you can try sfc /scannow /offbootdir=D:\ /offwindir=D:\windows) then chkdsk /r (or chkdsk D: /r) to see if the i/o errors have gone away

If it is still registering as the D: drive then this can be cleared at that command prompt with the usual bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /fixboot and bootrec /rebuildbcd combo. Hilariously I find a Win9x boot disc with fdisk /mbr works as well and boots much faster, despite the warning that no FAT or FAT32 partition is detected (NTFS is considered non-DOS). All you need it to do is clear any reference to a drive letter so C: will get assigned to the only drive

Then try booting up Windows 7. If it's a failing drive, then none of this should help and you will still get errors even when trying to clean install Windows

 

[USAFRet]

as there are some important documents and precious photos I want to keep.

Stop messing with this drive as the OS.

Obtain some other physical drive, install an OS on it.
Then, connect this drive and attempt to recover whatever files you wish to keep.