Unable to reinstall windows

mescallw

Posts: 7   +0
Hi guys thanks in advance for reading.

The situation in short is as follows: My roommate's computer crashed. It will not load windows. It will not boot into safe mode. I can access the bios and the computer recognizes that the hd is installed.

Additional details:
The computer itself is about 3-4 years old and is running windows 7. The videocard was starting to tweak a few weeks ago (crashing out of games but not crashing windows). I initially hypothesized that the VC caused the system to crash. However, we've replaced the videocard and now we have all these other problems. The system was not behaving abnormally other than that prior to this catastrophic crash.

What I've tried:
I tried to reinstall windows on a different partition (assuming that we might be able to recover some data from the old partition). However, after it "finishes" installing windows, it restarts and says that it cannot finish installation in safe mode (even though it forces itself into safe mode regardless of the options I select). I also tried to make a boot disk to check the health of the hd (seatools) but it will not recognize/boot the disk.

Any suggestions are appreciated.
 
I think the safest thing to do in this situation is to pull the HD and get the data off of it first. If the disk is physically failing your time may be limited. You can either attach it to a second PC's internal SATA slots, or use a enclosure (or something of the like) and get the data off via USB.

Then you can evaluate if the disk is having issues...Using SMART or Seatools, etc.

If the disk looks ok, you can either attempt to recover by marking the old install primary and active with a utility of your choice. Or if you have all the data you need, just format the whole thing and start fresh.
 
Thanks Spade. I pulled the HD last night and replaced with an extra one I had lying around. We got most of the way through installing windows on it and then microsoft decided that it didn't want his cd key to be valid anymore. I'm gonna call them today and see whats up. I'll post an update when I get some new information.
 
Yes, just call Microsoft's automated activation line and tell the robot that you have installed Windows on this computer only
 
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