Came home today to find a note from my dad saying nothing happens when he turns the computer on.

I go to boot it up and it loads Startup repair.

Then get an error saying startup repair won't work on the version of windows installed.

Choose advanced options and try system recovery and reinstalling from image. These are completed successfully but on reboot the same thing happens.

I'm curious that it's saying windows is installed to drive E: (and not C:) making me wonder if the C drive is corrupt big time, or whether there has been some kind of virus which has got windows etc thinking it's installed on the wrong HDD.

The only thing left to try is a fresh install of windows, but I need to wait and see what the parents say first.

Anyone got any ideas or suggestions as to the cause, I know its a long shot asking as there's quite a few possibilities...

My first choice would be to whip out the C: drive and put it in something else. You can see if its working, scan it for viruses and hopefully recover and files before formatting it and returning it to the PC.

I'm thinking I might pop into PC worl and buy the cheapest smallest capacity HDD they have there and install windows on that...I'm not putting the C drive anywhere near my computer...god knows what's on it with my dad...

Times like that I would straight away go for the format & re-install option but thats not viable for a lot of people due to data loss (everything important sits in my dropbox... worst I lose is my Steam games & saves).

Steam has a save cloud now, and you can backup the games to DVD

Thought the save cloud was only for 'steamplay' games which isn't that many at the moment. Backing up the games to DVD is all good if you plan ahead... I dont. But its not the end of the world to put them all on download and leave PC on for a day or 2

Hmmm might use this to setup Dropbox sync of my steam saves anyway

Yeah, the plan is:

Buy Win 7 & office (student deals make it much cheaper) as I can't find both Win 7 discs so pretty sure I'd be installing my copy on their pc, and office for the sake of it
Buy cheap HDD from pc World

Install on new HDD, get it running, and see what's going on with the C drive. Thankfully my mum has been saving her work to an external drive, so worse we lose is my dads photos I think...(if the drive is f**ked)

Most annoying thing is the student windows deals are upgrades only...meaning I have to install xp or vista and then upgrade ><

This gets more and more strange...

I picked up a new HDD at PC world...swap the cable round so that it is on Sata 1 and the old primary disk is now on sata3.

Pc fails to boot. After much headscratching I remove and reseat the gfx card, joy.

Guess what happens next...

Win XP boots up.

I'm still not sure what is going on. I think Win 7 was an "upgrade" or something and its reverted back to Win xp, I'm now installing a fresh upgrade to be safe...

You can just enter the key and install fresh.  You don't have to upgrade.

Hmmm.. Very strange, the new HD hasn't got XP on it by any chance? Not a dodgy PC world sale?

No, it's a previous install. All the user accounts are there. I wish I could remember what the deal was with how I installed W7 last time. I do think I ended up installing XP and then installing W7 on top.

The upgrade key wouldn't work with my version of W7 as the disc is Home premium and the key is professional, so I've installed it to activate later and then used the key on anytime upgrade to upgrade HP to P...

Can't you just disconnect the old drive completely, install windows on the new drive and when its all done and dusted plug the old drive in on another sata port and recover as much as possible from it? Or did i miss something?

Quote from: Bacon on May 20, 2011, 23:52:13 PM
Can't you just disconnect the old drive completely

As soon as I read that I thought the second half of the sentence was going to be "and throw it out of the window"

You should use a boot CD like Hirens to run some scanning/diagnostic tests on the drive, you won't have to remove it from the computer or worry about a virus infecting anything.

it's all reconnected up now, not lost any "data"

If I can be assed tomorrow I'll check the SMART info and maybe do some diagnostics but I'm mostly sure it won't happen again...