Need help desperately please

Ady2009 · 19 Dec 2021 at 06:45

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

Ady2009 · 19 Dec 2021 at 10:50

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.

Ady2009 · 19 Dec 2021 at 11:15

When I run the 'bootrec /rebuildbcd' command it come back with,
'Total identified windows installations: 0'

Any ideas?

Ady2009 · 19 Dec 2021 at 17:08

It is now trying to load windows but goes to a black screen after a few seconds and does not go any further. I have checked the boot file and it looks ok

Ady2009 · 20 Dec 2021 at 00:53

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.

Ady2009 · 20 Dec 2021 at 10:42

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.