Windows 7 not booting properly after weird restart...

Ok, I will try to explain this in as much detail as possible.

I was in the process of moving some files off one of my hard drives, and onto one of my external hard drives (I'll call it "My"). I was also in the process of downloading and installing Avira Premium Security Suite as a free trial. I didn't realize I still had a system scan from the free version of Avira running in the background as well until I saw my computer going through force closes for shutting down.

The transfer onto "My" was around 200GB of backup files. I was trying to move some files so that I could consolidate where I had stuff filed away so that I could use one of my other externals, I'll call it "Ex", to backup a bunch of important files. Here is the most important point for me in this. I was doing all of this because I literally just went "paperless" and today I decided to commit to it completely and threw away all my old documents from my teen years that dated as far back as '99. I no longer have these papers/photos/awards/etc., and would very much hate to lose the .pdf's I created, so this is very important to me that I don't mess anything up as I try to sort this problem out, and maintaining the integrity of my data if at all possible is my highest priority.

So more on the technicals. I have a computer that I built last summer. The most important aspect for the purposes of this post is that I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit edition on a C300 128GB SSD and on a 1TB hard drive. I have modified windows registry according to this guide: http://www.overclock.net/ssd/664738-how-setup-ssd-boot-drive-secondary.html so it is likely that I have important files on my SSD and my HD.

When I go into my BIOS, everything is recognized as it always was. I can see all my hardware and nothing seems out of place. However, when I try to get into loading windows I get the message: "reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key".

I tried to throw in both my Windows Home Premium disk and my Windows 7 Ultimate disk and tried to repair it. It said something about not having a valid partition entry or something along those lines. However, if I go to "install Windows 7" (without actually doing it, but getting to the partition page) I can see all my drives just fine there as well, and I can see that they still have the approximate space used/free as they did before the restart.

So this where I am stuck. I know there is probably a way to force a recovery of the files via a linux distro, but aside from that, I'm not sure if there is anything else I can try. I don't have a backup system image that's recent at all, and I'm not even sure I still have the one I'm thinking I made a while ago. I know, I'm lazy about that kind of thing, but...I was in the process of doing this tonight when all this happened. Oh the irony! rolleyes

So anyway, if any more information from me would be useful, feel free to ask away. It'll probably be tomorrow evening before I'll be next to my desktop again, but if I don't have to be near it, I might be able to give more information prior to then.

Thanks very much for any useful help/suggestions anyone might have.

 

This has been a ridiculous few days. Lots of things that I haven't been able to explain or reproduce have happened, so I'm hoping I'll be able to pinpoint the cause of this. However, I think this might be a hardware issue now, even though I originally thought it was going to be software, so if I would get better help in the hardware thread (especially if it is indeed a hardware problem) can a mod move this for me?

 

It sounds BIOs is currently programmed to boot off your DATA/"my"/"ex" drives, instead of the drive with the operating system on it. That is why you see that message, there is a slight chance that it is a hardware problem though, in your case though, I doubt it.

Double check your BIOs settings, look for an option called "boot order", USB should NOT be the first drive attempted to boot off of.

I pretty much always set the following boot order:

CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drives (INTERNAL)
Hard Drive (SATA / IDE INTERNAL)
Floppy
USB devices (USB CD ROM/FLOPPY/HDD)


2nd guess is, perhaps your OS, during the crash, is now trying to boot off another partition, ON THE OS DRIVE. (lots of pcs will include a RECOVERY partition on the same hard drive with the actual OS)

In that case, you'd need to use something like smart fdisk to reassign and Mark active the correct partition.

 

all right, well I guess I'll update this, as my problem isn't completely solved.

So I rearranged a bunch of my SATA inputs trying to find out exactly what was going on. Basically, my BIOS was still recognizing my SSD, but if I set it as the boot device, my computer wasn't recognizing any kind of bootable media.

During my switching of my SATA cables, I bumped the "MemOK!" feature on my Asus P7P55D-E Pro mobo, and it returned results of something being wrong with my memory. So I pulled two sticks, and went back to my computer, and it booted up.

However, I think this somehow had changed the boot drive, as after I went back into my BIOS, it showed my 1TB drive as being the boot drive. I switched it back, the computer did the same thing. So I eventually unplugged absolutely everything from my computer as possible, plugged in my mouse, keyboard, SSD and 1TB and tried a series of things.

Long story short, I finally think I have my RAM running as it's supposed to. I analyzed it with Prime95 for 6 hours after having my MOBO auto-overclock to max (i5-750 from 2.67ghz to 3.78ghz, which also had my RAM running at the expected 1600 (where the MOBO defaults it to 1333 if it's not OC'ed at least a little). Prime95 returned with no errors after that time.

I haven't run memtest86 yet on stock speeds to see if it could be erroring when it's not OC'ed though.

I am currently still booting with my 1TB drive being my "boot drive" even though it has absolutely no windows install files on it. Windows will boot for me just fine. However, my computer is running a little inhibited, as now I am having USB troubles. If I plug my webcam, or a USB thumb drive in, it crashes windows about a second after windows acknowledges something just connected.

As for the boot settings being the culprit, booting off USB was absolutely necessary for me, as I booted into a recovery distro of Linux and got my files from my system so that I didn't risk losing everything. I also switched it back. I wish it had been as easy as that because this would have been solved about 5 minutes after the problems started.

Your 2nd guess I think is closer to maybe what's going on, or maybe related to what's happening. It seems like I'm at the point where when I finally get one thing resolved, these issues are presenting themselves in another way.

So again... if anyone has any relatively sane suggestions, please help me out. The next thing I'm going to end up doing is trying to reformat everything and set everything back up, but the next time I can get around to that will be next weekend. I'd really prefer not to have to go that route though.

Thanks.

 

Guess I can officially chalk this one up to "a waste of time." Thanks for the attempted help I suppose.

 

hopefully this wont be a waste of your time but i had a similar problem with win7.i plugged in my external drive and created a disc image, after i was finished i powered off the computer. when i booted it back up i noticed it didn't want to boot, i restarted it and it rebooted but it showed a strange desktop. most all of the icons was missing and the ones that were there were weird looking. i removed my external drive and rebooted and everything was fine so i hooked up the external again and rebooted and the problem showed up again,removed the external and rebooted and it was fine. my best guess was that the computer was booting or trying to boot from the external drive. maybe that is what is happening with yours. hope this helps.

 

I appreciate the response, but this problem was replicated numerous times without the external hooked up. It's also been booted up with the external hooked up since without repeating the problem, so unfortunately, the problem isn't coinciding with the problem you experienced.

Frankly, the Asus P7P55D-E Pro has given me so many problems. I'm about to give up with it and start a new build.