EDIT: How do you attach screenshots from my computer???
Hello good people.
So, it's going to take a while to explain the chain of events leading to my current problem, I know it's convoluted and long but please bear with me and I will try to explain it as best as I can.
My dad's pc has 2 hard drives: an old drive from which he created a clone ("new") a month ago, and the clone on which he has been working since. They both have several partitions. Each drive has a partition on which win 7 is installed and one on which win 10 is installed, and he's only been using the new one for the past month.
Yesterday, he was trying to back up a .pst file from win 7 (probably not very important). Upon completion, he used partition magic 8.0 (what he's always been using) to switch to the win 10 partition, but something went wrong and win 10 couldn't load and instead we got a "something went wrong " blue screen which then lead us to some of win 10's troubleshooting tools - none of which worked (they all threw some kind of errors).
Ironically, while you might think that is what I was gonna ask about, it is not, because since yesterday we've made matters even worse.
Don't ask why, but today we used the same program with which my dad cloned the old hard drive - "Acronis" - to delete the contents of some unused partition from the new drive. We thought that
it might help us with something but it didn't, and what followed is pretty bad. Upon leaving Acronis and trying to boot again (back to the win 10 troubleshooting tools) we suddenly got a black screen
with the msg "No operating system found". It seems that for some reason, after deleting the old unused partition, that partition was somehow set to be the active partition.
At this point we connected back the old hard drive (which is working fine) and entered win 7 to take a look at the disks and partitions inside the Disk Management tool.
I think the partitions of the new drive got completely messed up because none of the partitions had a drive letter next to them and the active partition was indeed the empty one which we had deleted. So, using DISKPART, I was able to do 3 things:
1. Change the right partition to be the active one (the leftmost one).
2. Assigned the letter E to the volume that represents the new hard drive - after which the letter E appeared next to the right-most partition.
3. Set the "info" attribute of that volume so it wouldn't be "Hidden" (I thought this might solve the issue).
After that I tried to boot from the windows 7 partition (the one I set to Active) of the new drive and indeed the logo of windows 7 appeared(!!!) but got hung on the splash screen.
So to sum up my problem is this:
After setting the win 7 partition of the new drive to ACTIVE and trying to boot from it, I get to the splash screen with the windows 7 logo...and it just stays there.
I don't know what else to do and could really use some help. Here are some relevant screenshots:
As you can see, Disk 0 is my faulty new drive, and it's left most partition is the one I set to active using DISKPART...but win 7 just hangs when I boot it.
The right-most partition (454 MB) for some reason is the only one that's associated with volume E.
Disk 1 is my old drive which works fine.
This is a screenshot from DISKPART showing the partitions I have on my old drive, and the details of Partition #1 which is working and booting my old win 7.
And lastly, this shows the partition on my new drive, as well as details on Partition #1 which is set to Active but NOT WORKING.
Hello good people.
So, it's going to take a while to explain the chain of events leading to my current problem, I know it's convoluted and long but please bear with me and I will try to explain it as best as I can.
My dad's pc has 2 hard drives: an old drive from which he created a clone ("new") a month ago, and the clone on which he has been working since. They both have several partitions. Each drive has a partition on which win 7 is installed and one on which win 10 is installed, and he's only been using the new one for the past month.
Yesterday, he was trying to back up a .pst file from win 7 (probably not very important). Upon completion, he used partition magic 8.0 (what he's always been using) to switch to the win 10 partition, but something went wrong and win 10 couldn't load and instead we got a "something went wrong " blue screen which then lead us to some of win 10's troubleshooting tools - none of which worked (they all threw some kind of errors).
Ironically, while you might think that is what I was gonna ask about, it is not, because since yesterday we've made matters even worse.
Don't ask why, but today we used the same program with which my dad cloned the old hard drive - "Acronis" - to delete the contents of some unused partition from the new drive. We thought that
it might help us with something but it didn't, and what followed is pretty bad. Upon leaving Acronis and trying to boot again (back to the win 10 troubleshooting tools) we suddenly got a black screen
with the msg "No operating system found". It seems that for some reason, after deleting the old unused partition, that partition was somehow set to be the active partition.
At this point we connected back the old hard drive (which is working fine) and entered win 7 to take a look at the disks and partitions inside the Disk Management tool.
I think the partitions of the new drive got completely messed up because none of the partitions had a drive letter next to them and the active partition was indeed the empty one which we had deleted. So, using DISKPART, I was able to do 3 things:
1. Change the right partition to be the active one (the leftmost one).
2. Assigned the letter E to the volume that represents the new hard drive - after which the letter E appeared next to the right-most partition.
3. Set the "info" attribute of that volume so it wouldn't be "Hidden" (I thought this might solve the issue).
After that I tried to boot from the windows 7 partition (the one I set to Active) of the new drive and indeed the logo of windows 7 appeared(!!!) but got hung on the splash screen.
So to sum up my problem is this:
After setting the win 7 partition of the new drive to ACTIVE and trying to boot from it, I get to the splash screen with the windows 7 logo...and it just stays there.
I don't know what else to do and could really use some help. Here are some relevant screenshots:
As you can see, Disk 0 is my faulty new drive, and it's left most partition is the one I set to active using DISKPART...but win 7 just hangs when I boot it.
The right-most partition (454 MB) for some reason is the only one that's associated with volume E.
Disk 1 is my old drive which works fine.
This is a screenshot from DISKPART showing the partitions I have on my old drive, and the details of Partition #1 which is working and booting my old win 7.
And lastly, this shows the partition on my new drive, as well as details on Partition #1 which is set to Active but NOT WORKING.