Went back to Windows 7 and now everything is FUBAR.

Hello guys I got a huge problem and I'm praying you can help me again. On Monday, I created a thread about my Windows 10 PC crashing and being stuck in a restart loop that went to an empty blue screen and start the loop all over again. Thanks to reddwarf4ever, I was able to get out of that loop. Not long after, my PC would crash constantly and at random times. This morning I got tired of it and went back to Windows 7, hoping that would fix it.

It did not fix it, things only got worse. My PC started to crash within minutes of logging in. I was able to go into safe mode with networking. I ran command prompt and tried sfc /scannow. It said something was up but it could not fix it. It wouldn't crash in safe mode so I thought maybe it was my ATI driver. I followed AMD's steps to uninstalling their stuff and reinstalled the driver, still crashed. I thought maybe my ram was bad or my PSU wasn't all the way plugged in. I checked my connections and tried different sticks, still crashed.

I continued to try to fix it when I got back from work. Startup repair wouldn't work, I put in my Windows 7 OEM disc to repair the install and that didn't work, I tried command prompt from the disc but my keyboard wouldn't work most of the time and when it did I got the same response as in safe mode, and bootrec said the path didn't exist or there were not Windows installations. I tried to clean install Windows 7 but it can't find my hard drive, and I tried again after changing the cords, still nothing. I tried using the windows 10 usb stick I made and that said my PC needs a boot repair. Now I can't log in or get into safe mode, it gets to the windows 7 logo and restarts and safe mode says please wait while it loads the drivers but it too restarts. What the hell happened to my PC. I don't really have the money to get a new one.

Sounds like your boot partition is merrily hosed. Use the Windows 7 install disk, and wipe the whole drive, do you have all of your personal files backed up? Run the Windows 7 installer, and when it gets to the Disk Formatting screen, just delete all of the partitions. Then "create new" and it will re-create all of your needed system partitions, should be a 100mb partition before (or after) the main partition.

The drive itself may have developed bad sectors due to all of this, what you need to do is find a Disk Utility for your make of HDD. You can usually get these from the maker of the HDD, on their website. You'll have to make a bootable CD or Flash Drive with the tool in it. I use Hiren's Boot CD because it has just about every manufacturer's tool under "Dos Programs->Hard Disk Tools". But i don't know if I'm really allowed to suggest that as part of a solution. But you really need to check that HDD. If it is an SSD drive, you'll have to get whatever tool for that from the manufacturer, those are a different story.

But if you can scan your drive, if there are any problems with it, the tools can usually repair them. That's where i'd start. After that, then you can use the Windows installer disk, just wipe every partition on the drive and create a new system partition.

First step from what you have said that your drive not been seen by Windows, make sure the HD can be read in the Bios, if it's not there it's a gonner and you need a new one. If it is in the Bios the Command prompt from the disk points to sources folder I believe, try changing it to C:
If this still fails the posts above explain how to start fresh.

While you can't rule it out, I find it hard to accept that simply running Win10 is going to damage a perfectly good HDD in any way -- including suddenly creating bad sectors. What's more likely is that the drive has been failing over time and now, the sector failure rate has reached the point that sectors containing hardware drivers and/or sectors containing boot files have been affected.

It's also possible it could be the motherboard failing, keyboard problems, and/or memory problems. All could manifest in similar manners.

What I've done in the past is get the HDD "out of the loop", and by that, I mean running an OS and doing real work without using the HDD. This typically means running from one of the Linux LiveDVDs -- Ubuntu is a prime example. If you know someone who can go to the Ubuntu site, download and burn an ISO of the current version to a DVD, and boot from that -- and select the Try Ubuntu option -- you will then see how well you can run an OS without using the HDD. If you can do that for a while (say, an hour or more) and nothing goes wrong, you've pretty much singled out the hard drive as the problem.

Mark Phelps said:

While you can't rule it out, I find it hard to accept that simply running Win10 is going to damage a perfectly good HDD in any way -- including suddenly creating bad sectors. What's more likely is that the drive has been failing over time and now, the sector failure rate has reached the point that sectors containing hardware drivers and/or sectors containing boot files have been affected.

It's also possible it could be the motherboard failing, keyboard problems, and/or memory problems. All could manifest in similar manners.

What I've done in the past is get the HDD "out of the loop", and by that, I mean running an OS and doing real work without using the HDD. This typically means running from one of the Linux LiveDVDs -- Ubuntu is a prime example. If you know someone who can go to the Ubuntu site, download and burn an ISO of the current version to a DVD, and boot from that -- and select the Try Ubuntu option -- you will then see how well you can run an OS without using the HDD. If you can do that for a while (say, an hour or more) and nothing goes wrong, you've pretty much singled out the hard drive as the problem.

Good Frelling idea! Hiren's Boot CD has a version of PartedMagic, you can probably use that to test the drive. But just use any UBUNTU disk and see how your system runs. You need help chanking your HDD ask me and I'll walk you through it step by step, cos it's not simply running a chkdsk on it. If I knew what make HDD, I could point you to the right tools.

Posting from my (hopefully) fixed PC. I had to go to my BIOS and change over to ACHI in order for the Windows 7 disk to read my hard drive and I deleted the partitions that were listed. There have been no problems so far, windows update took all night which is why I'm late posting. I won't mark this as solved yet for a few more days just in case. Thanks to all those who posted here trying to help me.

It's always nice to have a system image backup available when making major changes.