So many problems! Error messages. Please read and help if you can

abenavraham said:

"Is the operating sytem worth backing up right now if it is so screwed up though?"

Possibly

We still need to figure out the health of your drives. What Raid Controller is installed? When you boot is there any option to bring up the controller/array menu to determine the health of the drives?

Can you bring up a command prompt when the system is booted? If not press and hold the "Shift" key while clicking on restart. This will allow you to boot into a trouble shooting mode where you can bring up a command prompt and run scan disk from there.

If scandisk finds any bad sectors then you will need to replace the drive(s)

Don't mean to sidetrack your questions and your direction. But if the system boots up now and is at least usable enough to try to fix, a complete image is in order. If nothing else, it's a base that can be restored if further "surgery" is attempted, and goes sour. It's a known point. Takes 15 minutes, max 30. One benefit of Macrium is the ability to have multiple images, so it's not either now or later, it can be both, and ongoing. Food for thought.

During boot up, after post and before loading windows holding the shift key +I key will probably bring up the Raid Configuration options. I'm not sure why you would need to though, you know your 2 hard drives are in Raid 0.

You do not need expensive cloud storage. Just a couple of external hard drives. I image to 3 different external drives. A different one each time. I image about twice a week. That allows me to go back to most any point in time in case of a virus or any other problem. Plus consider, it is not a question of if a hard drive dies, it is a question of when it will die. They all do eventually.

Squibbler said:

Ok some good advice here... I am nearly done with basic backups of the files that I feared to lose ... I have a separate brand new external drive that I can try and do an image on... not sure how much space it will need and this drive has previous backups and images on already ...will attempt that tomorrow as getting late here ...however, I wonder if Macrium will struggle to load on my desktop since the other file associations errors were coming up for those other programs? Would loading it onto desktop be the best place or in its own directory?

Would it be possible to post a screenshot of your Disk Management display?

TC, his OS is messed up, and the only way to try a Macrium image would be to boot to a Macrium stick, or Kyhi's media (which has Macrium on it). The ultimate intent is to perform an in-place repair install to get his OS working properly again.

We were going to boot to Kyhi's media, determine HDD health, perform CHKDSK and then backup.

simrick said:

TC, his OS is messed up, and the only way to try a Macrium image would be to boot to a Macrium stick, or Kyhi's media (which has Macrium on it). The ultimate intent is to perform an in-place repair install to get his OS working properly again.

Ah! Forgot about the Kyhi! Perfect!

That will likely flip-flop his SATA & RAID bios settings again......

f14tomcat said:

Ah! Forgot about the Kyhi! Perfect!

We were going to boot to Kyhi's media, determine HDD health, perform CHKDSK and then backup.

He booted once to that, and this is how his RAID config was changed in the BIOS, although I'm not sure how that could happen....