I'm in Gateway Win 7 HELL!!!

Yanno how you want to just beat your head against a wall when you agree to fix someone's computer and find out AFTER THE FACT they tried to do the "let's search on google to fix this myself" thing before handing it over?

Yeah, that's where I am right now.

I have a feeling she hosed it to the point of a complete re-install and she has never done a backup of her HD ever...so bye bye business files....maybe, unless you guys have any ideas....

It's a Gateway (yuck) MS2273 she bought from Radio Shack (double yuck), running windows 7 home premium.

I'm pretty convinced it started as a malware problem, but I have to be able to get INTO it to get that taken care of. When she handed it to me, it wouldn't even boot up, she found some website that had DOS commands...and from system recovery she went to command prompt and managed to screw it completely up.

she said and I quote "it had some error message I don't remember and I like googled it and it said to do what I did, then it gave me a registry thing error and I googled that and did that....but now it doesn't work at all"

Ya think?

So I got it back to where I can access SRO....and I'm in the death loop...system restore starts, but doesn't finish, I checked the registry hive files, and of course, whatever she did the regback is the same date as the primary...so that's useless to rewrite the registry in an attempt to get this going again...(startup repair problem signature shows corrupt registry)

I know with Vista and older versions you were able to get into the snapshots of restore points and pull registry backups from there - can it be done with Win 7 in DOS?

I'm bleary eyed and probably left out information you need...I'm going to bed and will check back tomorrow....thanks in advance!

HMW

 

Well What have you really Done So Far your Post in kinda un-clear.:confused

 

I would connect the hard drive to another laptop/computer with a caddy, or, cables similar to these to extract the data and save it
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_f...ive+cable+connector&_sacat=See-All-Categories
If you want to try factory recovery
http://support.gateway.com/s/SOFTWARE/Medialess/MLXPH2/MLXPH2faq6.shtml

 

You can remove any important files either with an adapter as backlogic suggested or you can use a small linux distro like Puppy to copy the files from the hard drive to a USB external or flash drive.

I believe Windows 7 stores the registry hives in the same location as XP which is C:\System Volume Information. But, with XP, I can browse this folder and cannot in Windows 7 even as admin because of permissions. You could use Puppy to open the folder. Hopefully you would see the restore points.

If Puppy can access them, then follow the procedure here. The only problem I see is with permissions of the registry hives after you copy them from System Volume Information but I am not that familiar with permissions.

If you decide to use puppy I would download the Lucid Puppy (Ubuntu-Compatible Build).

Recover files from Windows hard disk using Puppy Linux

 

Yep, that is where I was stumped, I couldn't see them but I know restore points are there...they showed during the brief moment system restore tried to run...

I'll give puppy a try -can't do any more damage than what she already did. rolleyes

GOLDENSKULL - I haven't done much of anything other than bring it back to where I could access the repair options & see what errors it was bringing up...I hit the wall tgell described, it was late and I said to hell with it for the night.


THANKS!!

 

Do you have a Windows 7 Home Premium install disk? If so, I would just run a Windows Repair Install. This should preserve the original Windows product key, as well as all installed programs and data.

Of course, backing up the current system before the Repair Install is always a good idea.

 

I do for mine, but not the right version for her computer, figures, huh?


Sooooo, I just said to hell with it, used puppy to iso the user info and saved it to my zip drive and just reinstalled.

TGELL - you can see the registry hives in puppy, but they are binary so you can't actually get INTO them to extract anything. (well, I guess you could if you wanted to go uber geek with it, I was in no mood....)


Anywhozits....she's back up and running, I should have just done what I did from the start....that's what I get for trying to find a creative solution...pffft

thanks guys!

 

Speccy should tell you what the Keygen is for her version of windows 7
http://majorgeeks.com/Speccy_d6358.html

The keygen should auto update the version of windows 7.as long as you have the correct Key.