How do I restore booting from my WIN7 C drive?

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What happened:

I was going to backup my C drive, so I snapped in a destination drive and started my computer. As it was booting I noticed the data cable on the destination drive looked loose, I reached to push it in and it came loose from the drive when I touched it.  No software was running just a regular boot.

The Result:

Computer will no longer boot from C drive. I booted from a 6 months earlier copy of the C drive. The boot partitions in the (damaged?) drive now seem to have too little in them (lookig from an app) but I can see all the data is still there and I can copy it data from it.

My Attempts to Fix:

I removed all the other drives and just left the unbootable C drive there.  I successfully booted from the Win 7 install disk that came new with this computer, then attempted to choose the REPAIR option. Windows responded that this was not the correct version of windows (even though this was the WIN7 CD that came with the machine.)

I have some apps like “4Ddig Windows Boot Genius” and PAassit but I’m very reluctant to try them and possibly kill the original drive that I can at least still get data from just not boot. So the status quo is that one particular piece of software that I had installed recently will not install on the 6 month old clone, something about a missing windows file.

I suppose I could take the machine to a “pro” and hope that person gets it right the first time or I could try running the Boot Genius app and pray for good results.   Thank you in advanc for your advice! 🙂

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Since your 6 month old backup is bootable, and you can view your data on the other drive, I would move forward by copying data (and other stuff like bookmarks and emails) from the new drive to the old.  The programs if any that don’t work I would look for specific solutions to fix.

Instead if you want to try to fix booting on the other drive, I would try making a Windows 7 rescue disk, and instead of a repair install, I would boot to command prompt or is it called recovery console, and use fixboot and fixmbr.

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What finally worked for me (and I’m embarrassed at how obvious it was) was to use my 6 month old backup drive to create a windows repair disk that I then used to repair the damaged disk.  As everyone but me probably knows you can make the repair disk on any computer running Win7 64 bit.

Thanks for the help here and I hope this thread helps someone else!

Terry D.

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