HELP, Win 7 auto-hosed itself, can it be fixed?

I occasionally have to run a WIndows XP installation on my machine. The Win XP install must run in IDE mode, and the Win 7 install is on a Raid mirror array and must be run in Raid mode. For security and compatibility reasons, I never have both drives connected at the same time. When switching from one to the other, I disconnect the previous drive, reconnect the drive I want to boot with, and select the correct hard disk controller option (IDE or RAID) in the BIOS before booting.

Windows 7 apparently doesn't know what a keyboard looks like, and occasionally won't accept input from the keyboard during the boot phase. This just happened, and as a result I could not enter the BIOS to switch to RAID mode for the Win 7 disk. It then automatically began some kind of "SYSTEM REPAIR" process which I was also unable to interrupt because the system would not accept keyboard input. I managed to get to the power button and power cycle just as the process began.

Upon rebooting I was able to switch to RAID mode but now Windows would not boot.

"Windows failed to start ... (etc) ... File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc000000e
Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data."

In the recovery options, the startup repair procedure could not complete because of disk errors -- it instructed me to run CHKDSK. I opened a command prompt and attempted to do this. CHKDSK c:\ complained it found errors but was in read-only mode and could not continue.

CHKDSK c:\f ran a quick repair process that I suspect simply wiped out any remaining chance of successful recovery.

After running this CHKDSK, the startup repair process was able to run, but quickly completed, suggesting to me that its rapid 'successful' operation was actually the final sign that my Win 7 install was fully hosed.

ANything I can do?

Assuming Win 7 is hosed and I must reinstall, is there anything I can do to save the installs on my F: disk, which contained only applications? (Most of the apps were games installed under Steam, and given Steam's DRM I suspect there is no way this will work...)

 

Well, I went ahead with reinstall; we'll see if I can use my applications disk. :\

 

The only advice I would offer is, after Win 7 is up and running again, to install XP in a VM rather than your evidently risky current alternate boot configuration.

 

Thanks for the tip; it's something I will consider. In the meantime, simply doing a quick boot with no disk drives attached should enable me to switch disk controller modes without risk. So sad to learn this the hard way