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Undertoad · 03-20-2010, 05:10 PM

OK this morning I experienced a massive crash. It turned out that my video card was pressing against the SATA cable for the main Win 7 drive. This is one of the problems with a mutt system; it isn't engineered so carefully as to guarantee the optimum case layout and airflow and whatnot. So this morning the cable worked itself into a position where it was intermittent, and the result was a system that crashed and couldn't boot.

So after I cleaned out the entire case and reinstalled the hard drive in a better location, I tried to repair Win 7 from the install disk, but it found nothing that it could repair. It left the system unbootable. Gah!

I was forced to do a full reinstall. Win 7 helpfully put most of the important stuff in a folder "Windows.old" where it saved the Program Files and Users folders. I was able to get almost everything back, after working on it for hours.

I was unhappy that Win 7 didn't give me tools to try to recover the old installation better. It doesn't even have any sort of chkdsk built in to its system tools; it's still useful, you just have to know about it. I was mighty pissed that a repair didn't actually repair anything. It could have done better.

03-20-2010, 05:10 PM	#4
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	OK this morning I experienced a massive crash. It turned out that my video card was pressing against the SATA cable for the main Win 7 drive. This is one of the problems with a mutt system; it isn't engineered so carefully as to guarantee the optimum case layout and airflow and whatnot. So this morning the cable worked itself into a position where it was intermittent, and the result was a system that crashed and couldn't boot. So after I cleaned out the entire case and reinstalled the hard drive in a better location, I tried to repair Win 7 from the install disk, but it found nothing that it could repair. It left the system unbootable. Gah! I was forced to do a full reinstall. Win 7 helpfully put most of the important stuff in a folder "Windows.old" where it saved the Program Files and Users folders. I was able to get almost everything back, after working on it for hours. I was unhappy that Win 7 didn't give me tools to try to recover the old installation better. It doesn't even have any sort of chkdsk built in to its system tools; it's still useful, you just have to know about it. I was mighty pissed that a repair didn't actually repair anything. It could have done better.