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I've had the unfortunate experience of somehow destroying my Windows 7 Pro installation so that I cannot even get into "SAFE MODE". The furthest that I get is before the colored swirl over the "Microsoft Windows"....then I get dropped into startup recovery.

The automated Windows startup recovery is unable to help me....So I figure ok, just reset back to an earlier checkpoint. Well I tried about three of them and none of them worked.

Then another problem started happening, the checkpoint recovery program stopped working after allowing me to select the restart poing. The RSTRUI.EXE program gave me a mem ref error.

OK, I figure it is a problem with the disk copy of the program, but try again by starting from the Windows 7 Installation DVD. I still get the mem ref error in RSTRUI.EXE.

So I'm stuck....I have backups but did not do a disk image.

chkdsk shows NO problems on the operating system disk.

Aside from a reload ... anybody have any other ideas that I might try?

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2 Answers 2

boot from the Windows 7 DVD or Windows Recovery Environment (F8) and run the command prompt and run chkdsk and sfc:

chkdsk C: /r /f
sfc /SCANNOW /OFFBOOTDIR=c:\ /OFFWINDIR=c:\windows

(replace C: with the drive where you installed Windows 7)

Maybe this helps to get Windows working again. If not, use a Live DVD (Linux or WinPE), backup all data and reinstall.

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Well, I tried all the suggestions that I could find. All to no avail....thanks to all that gave any advice.

I think that I'm going to make an image at points where things are stable in addition to backups (which I was doing) this time. Thus I can get back to an image if all else fails.

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