Windows 7 failed to start. Missing or Corrupt winload.exe

[Finnman84]

Evening, I have family visiting this week and today my dad's laptop ran into an issue I need help with. Unfortunately my family leaves on Saturday so I don't have much time to fix the laptop

My dad's laptop is a Lenovo G780 that has developed a problem with windows during startups. Upon start up the Lenovo screens pops up and after it where the windows screen would be an error appears.

"Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause"
File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: The slected entry could not be loaded because the applications is missing or corrupt.

I have a win 7 home premium 64-bit re installation disc which I tried to use however the startup repair tool failed.

Problem Event Name : StartupRepairOffline
Problem Signature 01: 0.0.0.0
Problem Signature 02: 0.0.0.0
Problem Signature 03: unknown
Problem Signature 04: 0
Problem Signature 05:unknown
Problem Signature 06:1
Problem Signature 07: unknown
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033

System Restore says no resort points have been created and the only system image backup is from 11/17/2012.

Any assistance would be appreciated


I'd be fine reinstalling the OS, but my mom just all the photos from her phone onto this laptop and they don't want to lose them.

 

[Nuwan Fernando]

get to Command prompt form the startup with the Disk. Then type
sfc /scannow
It'll check for the windows files and restore the original if found altered.

 

[Finnman84]

get to Command prompt form the startup with the Disk. Then type
sfc /scannow
It'll check for the windows files and restore the original if found altered.

I get a message saying "There is a system repair pending which requires reboot to complete. Restart Windows and run sfc again

Tried restarting and got the same message

 

[Finnman84]

Can I remove the laptops hard drive and connect it to my desktop to repair windows?

 

[Nuwan Fernando]

Windows repair won't do like that. You can try putting the installation media into the Laptop and boot using it and select repair and it'll try its best to repair that installation.

But if you want to backup your old files, that's a good idea to connect your Laptop HDD to a Desktop.

 

[Finnman84]

So I installed the laptop HDD in my desktop to backup the old files however the laptop HDD shows up as Local Disk (F: ), Local Disk (G: ), and LENOVO (H: ). Oddly enough (F: ) has MFGSTAT on it, (G: ) is empty, and (H: ) has an image backup.

Shouldn't one of the Disks have the files I'm looking to backup? The desktop I'm using is running Win10 would that be an issue?

 

[Nuwan Fernando]

When installing windows, you'll loose only the files in C drive unless you really want all of them to delete. You can backup the F: which I feel is the Primary partition.(To check open, and it should show program files, windows,users folders). Once you back them up, you can install the windows. But make sure that you don't delete the partitions and format only the C; Drive.