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Can't get Win7 to boot, drive letters changed


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#31
dmccoy

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I think the reason it will not see any of your drives when you boot with rescue disk is because the raid drivers are not installed. Your best  options IMHO are to either perform a new clean install of Windows on the raid drives, breaking the raid or install the raid drivers before trying to edit repair the boot files.

 

Have you considered breaking your raid and performing image backups. Personally I am not a fan of raid for the OS, especially if using software raid. 
 
You can replace raid and have a better backup and image recovery system. Images in combination with regular data backups lets you recover from disk crashes easily. You also get full protection against user error, viruses, misbehaving software, file system corruption etc. RAID won't do any this and really the main benefit of a RAID is to allow a system to continue running when a disk fails.

Edited by dmccoy, 01 February 2018 - 04:20 PM.

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#32
SleepyDude

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Hi Mailalan,

 

Can I ask what happens exactly when you let the system boot normally? any BSOD?

 

If Windows gives you a Blue Screen and immediately reboot, start pressing F8 after power-on the computer to access the Windows 7 Advanced boot options, select Disable automatic restart on system failure then select the Default boot option for Windows 7, in case of a BSOD this will allow you to see any error message presented.


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#33
mailalan

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Well I disconnected the 4 spinning hard drives and tried booting with just the 2 SSD's in RAID1. That didn't work. I then tried booting with just 1 SSD. In both instances it hangs at the "starting windows" logo and reboots itself. I do not get a BSOD. In both instances after it rebooted itself I tried startup repair from the installation DVD and got the message that the windows could not be repaired.

 

At this point I am going to just reinstall Windows. I've been able to save all my data so I won't lose anything other than time. However this time I will install everything on the C: drive and not move my user profile and I will also start taking system image backups. 

 

Thank you everyone for all your time and help. I've learned some valuable lessons from this.


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#34
dmccoy

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That sounds like a good plan Let us know if you have any additional questions.
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#35
HapaxOromenon

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That sounds like a good plan Let us know if you have any additional questions.

 

Well I disconnected the 4 spinning hard drives and tried booting with just the 2 SSD's in RAID1. That didn't work. I then tried booting with just 1 SSD. In both instances it hangs at the "starting windows" logo and reboots itself. I do not get a BSOD. In both instances after it rebooted itself I tried startup repair from the installation DVD and got the message that the windows could not be repaired.

 

At this point I am going to just reinstall Windows. I've been able to save all my data so I won't lose anything other than time. However this time I will install everything on the C: drive and not move my user profile and I will also start taking system image backups. 

 

Thank you everyone for all your time and help. I've learned some valuable lessons from this.

 

Sorry to interrupt, but just one thing for the benefit of other users who might later view this thread. A few posts ago you were trying to access another drive in the Command Prompt using the cd command. That reason that didn't work is that in order to change drive, you need to include the /D switch (e.g. cd /D E:\). Alternatively, you can just type in the drive letter without any cd and it will change to that drive (e.g. E:).


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