Windows 7 startup and bootrec

[Bill]

Anyone able to help with this?

Laptop suddenly hung at beginning boot screen (pulsating wobbly Windows
). Boots ok into Safe Mode.
I was rung up and brought the machine here. The owner reports that
chkdsk came up with a report that said "Clean".
I have run DiskPart which shows the boot partition as Volume 1, the Q
recovery partition Volume 3 and the Windows 7_OS as Volume 2.
The machine in safe mode sees Windows as running on the C: drive
everywhere I've looked.

If I run bootrec /rebuild bcd, it says "Total identified Windows
installations: 1
[1] D:\Windows.

All the repair options looked at seem to see the Windows installation
as being on D:. But everything inside Windows thinks it's on C:

The machine was bought from PCWorld Business, who were asked to change
it from W8 to Windows 7. I am not confident about what they did, as it
is half set up in US English. She has the recovery DVD's, but they are
all for Windows 8, and we don't know whether the recovery partition is
for 7 or 8.

I've been using a straight Win7 Pro 64-bit installation DVD.

Any clues about what is wrong? Or what to do?. I'm a bit nervous about
blowing away anything else as she can use the machine in Safe Mode.
She has no full system image but has been backing up many files to the
cloud system PCWorld sold her with the machine.


--
Bill

[Bill]

In message <cFgtjhJj...@itsound.demon.co.uk>, Bill
<Billa...@gmail.com> writes

>I've been using a straight Win7 Pro 64-bit installation DVD.

Now this is interesting (at least to me!):

Diskpart from within windows safe mode gave

Volume 0 D DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 SYSTEM_DRV NTFS Partition 1500 MB
Volume 2 C Windows7_OS NTFS Partition 916 GB Boot
Volume 3 Q Lenovo_Reco NTFS Partition 13 GB Healthy

Diskpart when using the DVD in the drive says

Volume 0 F GSP1RMCPRXF UDF DVD-ROM 3167 MB
Volume 1 C SYSTEM_DRV NTFS Partition 1500 MB
Volume 2 D Windows7_OS NTFS Partition 916 GB Boot
Volume 3 E Lenovo_Reco NTFS Partition 13 GB Healthy
--
Bill

[Johnny B Good]

That looks to me like Diskpart has assumed (ASS U ME d) the drive letter
assignments rather than determined them from the registry.

When in safe mode, diskpart is obviously able to access the registry so
it correctly sees that volume 1 is not assigned a drive letter, that
volume 2 is assigned "C" and that Volume 3 (the normally hidden recovery
partition that most other OEMs, other than HP/Compaq, hide out of sight
of the consumer) has been assigned the drive letter "Q", suggesting the
OEM in this case is HP/Compaq.

When you boot from the DVD and use the recovery/install console Diskpart
either can't access the existing registry files on volume 2 or else is
ignoring such a potential source of confusion and simply shows the
standard drive letter assignments (probably based on the same rules that
MSDOS would use).

When it comes to installing windows NT5 onwards, you can create any
partitions you like on as many drives as you have and pick any of the
disk volumes (space permitting) into which to install the OS. Since
there's no benefit whatsoever in choosing a less obvious drive letter for
the system partition, the normal practice is to create a drive C suitably
sized for the job and choose that as the disk volume to install windows
onto.

With windows 2000, there's a great big 'gotcha' if a card reader is
present and enabled when installing windows. The installer unconscionably
pre-assigns drive letters C, D, E & F to the card reader slots and you
land up with windows installed onto the first active primary partition of
the hard drive which has been assigned the drive letter H.

The solution to this problem is simply to disable the USB interface in
the BIOS before re-running the installation. I believe the installers in
winXP and later solved this problem but for anyone trying to resurrect a
win2k machine that *now* has a 4 slot card reader fitted, it's important
to either disconnect it or, more simply if you plan on using it after
finishing the initial installation, just disable the usb support in the
cmos setup for the duration of the installation process (at least to that
point when it executes its first reboot from the HDD or SSD).

The only drive that you can't edit the drive letter assignments on using
DiskManager is the system drive (normally drive C). If you've somehow
managed to land up with windows installed to drive D, the only way, short
of a full re-install and paying attention to what you're doing, is to run
a third party utility, usually from off its own boot media (eg Paragon
Disk Manager rescue CD/bootable USB drive).

HTH & HAND :-)

--
Johnny B Good

[Bill]

In message <T5fix.1060793$pj.4...@fx16.am4>, Johnny B Good
<johnny...@invalid.ntlworld.com> writes

>
> When in safe mode, diskpart is obviously able to access the registry
>so it correctly sees that volume 1 is not assigned a drive letter, that
>volume 2 is assigned "C" and that Volume 3 (the normally hidden
>recovery partition that most other OEMs, other than HP/Compaq, hide out
>of sight of the consumer) has been assigned the drive letter "Q",
>suggesting the OEM in this case is HP/Compaq.
>
> When you boot from the DVD and use the recovery/install console
>Diskpart either can't access the existing registry files on volume 2 or
>else is ignoring such a potential source of confusion and simply shows
>the standard drive letter assignments (probably based on the same rules
>that MSDOS would use).

Thanks, that all explains what I was seeing. I now think that the
booting thing was a red herring.

I'm afraid I have posted a big, boring update on my other thread about
part cloning Windows drives. I'd obviously be delighted to receive any
useful comments or suggestions there.

Thanks again, Johnny.
--
Bill