Problem Booting Win 7

[thebkg]

I've had an existing Windows 7 system on a new PC (self built) for about 3 months now. The other day I had a sudden BSOD while watching a video on Youtube.

I let the BS finish the memory dump and reboot. After it rebooted it went thru POST as normal then nothing. I had a blank screen with a curser at the top. Windows 7 isn't being launched at all. I have a Raid 0 array of 2 WD 500GB Black drives run from the AMD SB750 chipset on an Asus M4A79XYD EVO.

I did boot from the Windows disc and attempt to use the auto recovery options there. Neither going back to an earlier restore point nor the 'Startup Recovery' options fixed the problem.

Anyone have ideas?

 

[Saga Lout]

I've had an existing Windows 7 system on a new PC (self built) for about 3 months now. The other day I had a sudden BSOD while watching a video on Youtube.

I let the BS finish the memory dump and reboot. After it rebooted it went thru POST as normal then nothing. I had a blank screen with a curser at the top. Windows 7 isn't being launched at all. I have a Raid 0 array of 2 WD 500GB Black drives run from the AMD SB750 chipset on an Asus M4A79XYD EVO.

I did boot from the Windows disc and attempt to use the auto recovery options there. Neither going back to an earlier restore point nor the 'Startup Recovery' options fixed the problem.

Anyone have ideas?

You could benefit from being able to look at and modify bcdedit and my best recommendation would be to run a Live CD of a Linux build. My personal favourite is PCLinuxOS from http://www.pclinuxos.com and it does allow writing to NTFS as well as just reading from it.

 

[thebkg]

Can you give me pointers on what I'm looking for, or where I can find a tutorial? I haven't played with boot managment in a long time (win98).

 

[thebkg]

Update:

I was not able to repair the Win 7 boot. However by using an Ubuntu CD boot I was able to salvage all my data before rebuilding the raid. Apparently there is an inherant problem with using the WD Black drives in a Raid. I strongly suspect this was the cause of my problems at the beginning. So I'll be replacing them with RE3 drives asap.

 

[Saga Lout]

Update:

I was not able to repair the Win 7 boot. However by using an Ubuntu CD boot I was able to salvage all my data before rebuilding the raid. Apparently there is an inherant problem with using the WD Black drives in a Raid. I strongly suspect this was the cause of my problems at the beginning. So I'll be replacing them with RE3 drives asap.

I'm glad you recovered your data, particularly as Linux came to the rescue of Windows, which it so often does. RAID is a potential nightmare in any OS and unless there's a specific need for large linked hard disk space, now that you can buy a 1Tb disk for (in England) about £75, I don't see a place for RAID.

 

[thebkg]

I Raid for speed, not size. My real mistake was not keeping up with backups. It's a newly built machine so I wasn't concerned about it. Lesson learned.