Windows 7 install corrupt after update

Question

How do I fix a corrupt Windows 7 installation by hooking it up to a brand new Windows 7 install?

Installed some Windows 7 yesterday, mostly just optional fixes and it installed an update to my IntelliType or IntelliPoint drivers (Keyboard & Mouse). It asked to reboot, computer gets to the Windows load screen and redirects to the repair utility. Repair utility failed, it said if I recently installed a device, unplug it and try to restart.

So among other things...

• I unplugged my keyboard and mouse, restarted. Nothing.
• Tried to fix mbr via diskpart selection and bootsect.exe and the other utility FixMbr etc...
• Do not have system restore or backup available
• Tried booting into safemode, still fails.
• Ran a hard drive test, but it returned mixed results, wasn'tmanufacturers. This is a cheapy Kingston 64GB SSD, but I think the Windows installation is clearly the problem, the Windows updates messed it all up.

I managed to hook up the drive to another drive I have that I just installed Windows 7 on, and I was able to get all of my files (pretty sure). Drive looked fine to me.

How can I go about fixing it?

Answer 1

I have run into this twice in the past couple of days - and it points to a corrupted or changed boot sector or master boot record.

When it goes into repair and then says it can't fix the problem, choose the advanced options, open the command prompt, type in:

bootrec.exe /fixmbr

then reboot.

You may also need to run the /fixboot and/or the /rebuildbcd commands as well - Google on how to use these options.

This fixed one of the computers I saw this on.

On the other, it was a bit more complicated and I had to resize the main partition smaller so I could make another partition, then install a fresh copy of Windows 7 on the new partition - this rewrote the boot code and allowed me to boot the original version of Windows.

Once this was done I just deleted the second new install of Windows 7 partition.