Help ! Can't get my HD to Boot

Yes, at least I believe it was the Win 7 partition, as it was the OS partition.

 

Interesting. In most cases the Win7 partition is not the Active partition. If present, the System Reserved partition is the Active partition.

 

I may have made a bad choice when selecting which partition should be "active".

 

NEWSFLASH: I have the old HD installed and it shows up as drive "D".

But when I select it I get an error message that reads that I need to Format the drive.
D:\ is inaccessible.
The Volume does not contain a recognized file system.

Oh-Oh !

 

I opened up Disk Manager and my drive #1 (messed up drive) has 3 partitions:

39MB Healthy OEM Partition
Recovery (G) 9.12GB NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition)
(D) 1388.10 GB RAW Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)

Dang it ! A Raw partition.

 

Have a look in Disk Management. Does the partition show as RAW instead of NTFS?

 

We posted together. I made a good guess. Is the HD from a Dell?

 

Yes, it's a Seagate 1.5TB from a Dell desktop.

 

Did you make a Win 10 rUSB recovery drive? Perhaps you can borrow one.

The first time I tried to go to Win 10 was the first night it was available. Like many others my upgrade got stuck. After hours of staring at a blank black screen I did a hard reboot. Unlike others who did this, my system did not revert to Win 8.1. It was dead as a door nail. Nothing, not even my CD drive would work as a boot mechanism. I think that Win 10 first wiped most of my drivers and then did not fully install.

I had to buy a new PC. I made a Win 10 recovery drive on that machine and after umpteen different times and ways I was able to restore my dead PC to a functioning system. It was a bit weird since the recovery drive was made on an Acer and the PC that went bad is an Asus. So for a while I had a hybrid system -- an Asus in Acer Clothing. I was eventually able to reinstall all the Asus drivers and add-on features. My point -never give up.

There a host of suggested solutions on the net on how to recover a missing or corrupt "\windows\system32\config\system" file. Who knows? One of them might work for you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=\windows\system32\config\system&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Good Luck -- I Feel Your Pain - We All Do.

 

OK. In Win7 Dells the Recovery partition is the Active partition. But not to worry.

Let's see if we can fix the RAW partition. From an Admin Command Prompt enter...

chkdsk /f D:

When completed check Disk Management. Fixed or still the same?

 

Hi hawk1, No, unfortunately, no recovery drive. I usually do make recovery cd's when I get a new system, but I either did not do it, or have lost the recovery disks.

Thanks for the input.

 

Maybe you can borrow one. If an Acer Win 10 USB Recovery Drive was able to get my Acus PC up and running, that means it does not have to be made on your PC.

 

I'll look into it... maybe someone has a Dell recovery drive that will work.

Thanks for the suggestion.

 

OK.... it was running and then stopped at "stage 2 of 3. Chkdsk is Verifying Indexes"

An Unspecified Error occurred (6672732e637878 41a)

And then went back to the command prompt.

I went and looked at Disk Manager and did a "Refresh" and "D:" is still showing "RAW"

I will run chkdsk /f again.

 

I am running chkdsk /f for the third time. It does seem to get a little further each time, but it eventually just stops and all I see is a flashing curser.

Should I let it sit for several hours.... keep trying chkdsk several more times, or something different.

On Disk Manager, the D: drive is no longer shown as "RAW, but when I try to "explore" it in Disk Manager, I get the error message that "D:\ is not accessible. The parameter is not correct."

 

Geez. I am back to the error message that states:

D:\ is inaccessible.
The Volume does not contain a recognized file system.

WTH !

I noticed this last time I started chkdsk that a message right at the beginning said:

"The first NTFS boot sector is unreadable or corrupt.
Reading second Boot Sector instead."

 

pratzert,

I think you can "forget" that OS. It's either corrupt or the HD is failing. We can come back to that later.

Install your second HD, the one that contains the Win7 image, in your usable computer. Make sure this folder, "WindowsImageBackup" is in the root. Mount the image by...

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/17524-system-image-extract-files-using-disk-management.html

You will see 2 or 3 .vhdx files. Choose the largest. If a drive letter isn't assigned to the partition, Add one in Disk Management.

 

maybe he should just try recovering the data he needs off the drive?
then he could just format the disk and start from scratch

 

He won't get any data from that HD. We are trying to get data from the Win7 image.

 

Darn it... not great news for sure.

The other HDD is still in the desktop at work, so I have to pull it out tomorrow and bring it home.

I'll throw it into my home unit and see what I can find.

Thanks.

 

I've recovered data from a hard drive that gave the inaccessible error before - I guess the image would be preferable, but since he can't get to the other hard drive til tomorrow, he could go ahead and scan the disk with recovery software right? couldn't hurt

 

If you can mount the image and extract data then the odds of restoring the image are good.

I'd check the current HD, the one with the RAW partition, to see if it's failing. Download Data LifeGuard Diagnostic for Windows...

http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?lang=en

I know it's a Seagate. Right-Click on the WinDlg.exe file and choose to Run As Administrator. Check the SMART and a Quick Test. The software doesn't need to be installed.

 

Hi chrom_sturmen & Brian K,

I downloaded the drive testing software and will run it as a test on the drive as soon as the last chkdsk I started completes. It is still running. It pauses once in a while and I assumed it was "stuck", but then it advances once again. So it's possible I was not patient enough and did not let it keep running. It may have been correcting something. So I will let it go for a while longer as long as it seems to make some sort of progress.

I'll report back when it's "done". But I have no idea how long that may be.

It's getting late here (2130 hrs)... so we may have to pick start at it again tomorrow.

But I want to say again, THANK YOU, for your help.

 

Since the pc is going to be free for awhile, why not download EaseUS Data Recovery and let it scan the d: drive? Even if you wind up being able to get the data from the image, you'd still know if it's possible to reover it from the hard drive as well. EaseUS Data Recovery free version allows recovery of 2 gigabytes of data, but the broader idea is just to know if it's recoverable or not

 

chrome-sturmen,

Will do... Thanks !