Something on my windows 7 partition prevents win10 upgrade or boot

NavyLCDR · 14 Jan 2016

Nchi said:

Holy... You are right. I didn't even think of it... Wow. Just wow. Thank you so much for your help and time.

That's why we make images of what we want to keep before we go mucking around in uncharted territory

See my edit to post #19

Nchi · 14 Jan 2016

Working on AHCI 7 atm, but I wanted to ask why you recommend the ssd clone?

NavyLCDR · 14 Jan 2016

Nchi said:

Working on AHCI 7 atm, but I wanted to ask why you recommend the ssd clone?

From my understanding, you want to end up with a Windows 10 with all of your data/programs/settings kept from Windows 7? Basically you want to operate from an upgraded Windows 7 anyway, not a clean install of Windows 10. I would do the clone to the SSD first and make sure Windows 7 is operating properly on it, then upgrade to Windows 10 on the SSD. You maintain the Windows 7 on the HDD as a ready and easy backup to fall back to if something goes wrong with the upgrade. Once you have the Windows 10 running on the SSD, then it's a simple matter to reformat the old Windows 7 HDD to use for storage and you still have the previous Windows 7 image saved.

Once cloned to the SSD - disconnect the HDD for the upgrade. That way you don't end up with the boot files accidentally on it and have to fix booting after you reformat the HDD.

Nchi · 14 Jan 2016

I didn't really want to use the ssd for Windows, but it looks like I may have to. After getting 7 on AHCI I tried the upgrade from the hdd only to land on the good old spinning dots forever issue. I assumed this would work as 10 finally booted with that drive in, but it just won't have it. I have some stuff I'll just transfer off the ssd if it comes to it, sadly.

Nchi · 14 Jan 2016

Going to try an offline upgrade with the other drives out, might pull my network card too

Seems install media still sticks at the spinning dots.

I think I see what we did and how it worked the one time, after I set AHCI it couldn't read the win 7 partition, letting me boot, the win10 install I cancelled was a fresh install as well. Now that win7 works in AHCI the ssd install doesn't get past spinning dots or recovery.

So I am trying to clone my 215 gB win 7 install over to the 232 gB ssd and macrium tells me not enough space? Nevermind this, drag and drop was the key.

So I cloned the drive, Windows doesn't boot without the original drive. Tried to use macrium with only the ssd in and it freezes like it did with the original drive in.

NavyLCDR · 14 Jan 2016

I'm afraid I'm out of ideas. The only thing I can suggest is to try things with the minimum amount of hardware connected. It definitely sounds like a hardware/driver issue. I am curious, though...if you have an SSD - why isn't that what you would want to use for the operating system?

Nchi · 14 Jan 2016

Stubbornness to my old way. Thanks for your time.

Nchi · 16 Jan 2016

Got win 7 to boot on ssd, upgrade still fails in the same fashion. A couple odd things I found along the way, mbr is 500 megs for a 230g partition, Windows recovery from USB does not like my 7 install, says not a compatible version even though I uses that USB to install years ago. At this point I tried to go back to clean windows 10,but it wouldn't boot right so I reinstalled it, hopefully it will boot once I drop the storage drive and then I need to find a way to format that broken partition...