Windows 7 drive no longer booting.

[orangezorki]

Hello all,

A couple of years ago I put quite a bit of money into a Sandy bridge 2700k build with a Gigabyte Z68X-UD3P mobo, dual boot Win7 and Lion. But the general flakiness and lack of sleep etc meant that I haven't used it much in the past year.

Now, having found out that a UEFI bios is available, and with Mavericks being released, I thought that I would give it another go. So, I booted into Win7 and updated everything through windows update, and uninstalled the gigabyte utilities as suggested by the manufacturer. Only now, it won't boot.

The furthest I get is the beginning of the Win7 animation, the four beams of colour coming together - then it reboots, and asks to go into the recovery app. This can't repair the installation, and I have also tried pulling the mac SSD and HD, leaving just the 2TB windows drive.

The most frustrating thing is that I was one step away from loading the UEFI bios, and I don't want to have to load Mavericks without it. I don't have a backup of the win7 drive, but neither do I have any important data on there. Would be nice to keep my Skyrim saves though.

Any ideas? (Thanks in advance)

David

P.S. I know that this is a hackintosh, but copies of all OSs are fully paid for, and I think this is a problem that could have happened just as easily with a windows disk in a mac pro. Of course, if I'm not allowed to post about this, please just let me know and I'll delete the thread.

 

[ekiro]

Hello all,

A couple of years ago I put quite a bit of money into a Sandy bridge 2700k build with a Gigabyte Z68X-UD3P mobo, dual boot Win7 and Lion. But the general flakiness and lack of sleep etc meant that I haven't used it much in the past year.

Now, having found out that a UEFI bios is available, and with Mavericks being released, I thought that I would give it another go. So, I booted into Win7 and updated everything through windows update, and uninstalled the gigabyte utilities as suggested by the manufacturer. Only now, it won't boot.

The furthest I get is the beginning of the Win7 animation, the four beams of colour coming together - then it reboots, and asks to go into the recovery app. This can't repair the installation, and I have also tried pulling the mac SSD and HD, leaving just the 2TB windows drive.

The most frustrating thing is that I was one step away from loading the UEFI bios, and I don't want to have to load Mavericks without it. I don't have a backup of the win7 drive, but neither do I have any important data on there. Would be nice to keep my Skyrim saves though.

Any ideas? (Thanks in advance)

David

P.S. I know that this is a hackintosh, but copies of all OSs are fully paid for, and I think this is a problem that could have happened just as easily with a windows disk in a mac pro. Of course, if I'm not allowed to post about this, please just let me know and I'll delete the thread.

Why would you be using Windows when you have the beautiful Mavericks to play with? Is gaming your only reason? Why not use a virtual machine?

 

[orangezorki]

Why would you be using Windows when you have the beautiful Mavericks to play with? Is gaming your only reason? Why not use a virtual machine?

Gaming is a main one, but at the moment, I want to update the BIOS to UEFI so I can install Mavericks with minimal tweaks needed, and get sleep and everything else working properly. The problem is that the UEFI bios upgrade from Gigabyte is a .exe, so I need to get windows up and running again.

David

P.S. Thanks so much for even bothering to answer - I've waited more than a day on a major hackintosh site without a single reply.

 

[Jognt]

Wow, this sucks.. I just typed a whole story what you could do only to be greeted by "you are no longer logged in" after clicking submit. (*Yeah, it was that long)

Short version:
Install Windows again using the "keep my old stuff"/"repair"/"upgrade" function, backup skyrim, install bios, format all!

To backup before reinstalling:
boot from windows DVD/USB, make sure you have USB storage attached.
press SHIFT+F10 for CMD prompt, mount partition containing skyrim saves using diskpart (users\youraccount\documents\my games), robocopy the content to a safe place.

 

[Acorn]

if you can i would boot into mac side and then navigate to your windows bootcamp drive and grab the save files from your game off it. you cant move anything to the drive, but you should be able to pull stuff off it to osx. then you can move it to a external drive.

 

[orangezorki]

Thanks both of you for the replies. In the end I went with the copy in OSX option, having formatted a USB HD in FAT32.

I'm now in the process of reinstalling win7 and everything. Wish me luck!

David