Need help desperately please

Ady2009

Ady2009

Ady2009

Associate
Joined
4 Feb 2009
Posts
110
Location
Derbyshire
Hello all

My wife's Windows 10 laptop has not been backed up for a long time and so this evening I took the hard drive out of it and put it in my Windows 7 desktop to copy all the files over. Everything went well copying the files over to my Windows 7 desktop but when I put the hard drive back into her Windows 10 laptop then the laptop now refuses to boot!

I have tried using a install disk along with the repair option and it does not work. I have also tried putting the hard drive in another desktop which has Windows 10 and it will not allow me to access the drive. I can see the drive in 'computer management' though.

I have also tried running sfc scannow and it is not making any difference. Has anybody got any ideas? My wife is going to kill me in the morning.

Thanks
 
Can you see the drive in bios on the laptop? After post you might get an option to select boot drive, if not you'll need to verify the boot order.

I suspect either the drive hasn't been reconnected properly, or the boot order has shuffled.

Also for the future, investigate other ways of backing up the drive without needing to remove it. I assume both devices are on the network - perform the backup over network
 
Tried the bcdboot tool and it has made no difference.
Since last night I have change the permissions of the drive on my desktop and can now access the drive from the desktop.

I had to pull the drive as the laptop has been painfully slow for a while and trying to copy the files from a 500gb drive would have been torture.
 
Complete wipe and install from fresh. You don’t have the necessary skills to attempt a proper repair and by your own admission, have a recent full back up.

A fresh install will save you time and sanity. As suggested, whack in an SSD and call it a Christmas upgrade.
 
Yes, you are right. I don't have the necessary skills to do a proper repair but I have taken this as an opportunity for me to learn. Have put another hard drive in the laptop with a fresh install but have also kep the old hard drive in my desktop and am trying to understand why it fell over and how to get it working. Broken PC's, cars, washing machines, etc are all a learning experience.
 
Sticking an OS drive from one system into another with Windows isn't a great idea unless as a last ditch recovery as it has a tendency to mess about with boot settings/system files of its own accord and/or very easy to screw up permissions trying to access stuff causing problems for the original OS. Using an external adapter i.e. USB to SATA can somewhat alleviate that as Windows tends to leave what it sees as removable storage alone - but then sometimes you won't be able to properly access all files to do a backup.

Better off if at all possible to do the backup from the original machine.
 
As Rroff has mentioned adding it as an additional drive might have altered it.
Try FDISK /MBR to recreate the master boot record. Or FDISK /CMBR <drive number> if it's an additional drive. To determine the drive number use fdisk /status
 
The weird thing is that when I first put it back into the laptop then it booted up into windows fine. After it booted then one error message popped up about a file missing. I then restarted it and then that was it, it would not boot up again. It must be that the PC changed some files and then the laptop then changed the files and the problem snowballed. It has got me interested in boot logging and am going to give it try on the old hard drive.

Lesson learnt. I regularly pull the hard drive out of my own laptop running Windows 7 and put it in my desktop to copy large files over. The USB port on that laptop is a bit iffy and it it reassuring to have a direct connection via a SATA cable. I guess the problem with my wife's laptop was mixing file systems between Windows 10 and Windows 7. Will just stick to an external in the future.
 
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