Win 7 experts: How to FIX a misbehaving Win 7?

[NYT]

No SSD.

I have used TWO current windows 7 pro images. He had a key from a retail Win7 ult that he bought several years ago. One time I loaded up a Win 7 pro to see any difference. No difference at all. I have my own images that I use on disk and saved on a portable drive with all of my boot disks and linux disks. I have about 17 images of XP and 8 of Windows 7...

Windows 7 found drivers for the motherboard and after looking around for that board and driver issues before taking them to windows 7, I read a few forums where they said that windows 7 installed drivers for EVERYTHING and only needed the sound drivers to be reinstalled. The installation went just like everyone else said it would. Then after installing it for a second or third time or whatever, Caligunner1 gave me a link to some updated realtek drivers for sound and those seem to work as well. I was just reinstalling the XP drivers like everyone else until that. But I do not think it is this driver issue, but damn, when it hung up on me, it did not even get to the swirling dots for windows, and in safe mode it did not even show a top first file most of the time. The mobo has had the drives set to SATA- IDE I believe. I would have to double check, but they have ALWAYS been Native IDE and now that I think of it, the Hmm. No. The HD is a sata drive and the DVD burner is a PATA. I wonder if I should disable the dvdr next time it hangs up like that... :\


Sanfrantelecom: Thanks. I am no longer restoring a profile. I have just copied the main folders back and forth now and I am using a newer copy of Windows 7 that was updated till Jan 2015. :\

wow, ok. you have gotten some really bad advice it seems.

stable images absolutely require correct drivers. windows will limp along with built in drivers for only so long until bigger problems start occurring or your system performance drops.

if you are installing win 7 (any version) or even XP for that matter, you will need to run sysprep.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/286053-system-preparation-tool-use-customize-windows.html

my advice would be to skip the image altogether until you have something stable. when windows is installed, use a laptop to download all necessary drivers from the manufacturers website in accordance with what version of windows youre running. use a thumb drive to copy the drivers to the main machine and install them from there. dont install drivers from the thumb drive.

[Wallabing]

Run Memtest 24 hours to see if RAM is bad.

Then replace hard drive SATA cable, then the Hard drive itself.

Swap out PSU as last resort.

If all above doesn't work, consider your mobo bad.

[Dragunov]

If this is TLDR I apologize. I want to be thorough.

I was pretty good with windows XP, but Windows 7 well, the City used images, botched? Did not work? NP, just reimage it...

The problem is that I can not reimage windows 7. I used Macrium reflect to make a backup image of this thing and after restoring the image, things were not right, then it slipped back to non-booting after another boot or two...

I installed Windows 7 ultimate onto an Asrock 939SIS56-M board with an AMD xp 4200+

Everything went fine. I only needed to install the drivers for the sound and I did that via xp sound drivers from the asrock site.

Then I installed all of the programs it needed (they wanted office 2k10 put back on, and all of the free programs they had)

Everything looked great. Then I let it do updates. It did xx updates, took a while to download and install and while it was d/ling them, I used migwiz to put their profile back on from Windows XP.

After the updates and migwiz was done, I let it reboot and then the fun started.

Yo kow how windows 7 starts with the four color swatches spiraling towards the screen and swirling around? The text was there but the colors never started. waited and waited...

I hit ctrl-alt-del and immediately it restarted. It seems that it had hung.

SAME thing upon reboot. I chose an option next to REPAIR computer instead of start windows normally.

I let it do its thing and it said that it wanted to do system restore. I said no to see what else it could have been, it said it had bad drivers I think and they could not be fixed. I rebooted again and did the same and told it to do system restore. It had about 5 system restore points. I went to the top one, it could not do it. It gave some error in the end and said no files were changed after it looked like it was going through. I ended up with Hiren's boot cd and did a scandisk and all and it found some things and fixed them, but nothing worked.

Windows 7 is supposed to work FINE with this board, in fact, folks LOVE it apparently. But long story short, I tried about EVERY option I could with a failed bootup that day. Even booting in SAFE mode gave me ONE line of text across the top and then it hung. The text had an address loading from ......\system32

ONCE I found some stopcode that told me FE (usb hub/driver/something) but that was only once and I am not sure why that happened.

I ended up installing Windows 7 about 4 times that day (long day) because for whatever reason, the IMAGE I created would not work.

Now, about 4 days later, the owner called me and said it did it again. He told it to shutdown and it said it was going to update and when he turned it back on it just had a black screen with a cursor blinking...


So really, this is what I am looking for.
1. Is there any SUREFIRE image program that works best with windows 7?
2. Where can I go to read up on being a better ninja and manually getting this thing to start or making changes and forcing it to boot up?

Heh. Working at the City made me soft. Who needs to figure it out, we got PXE images! well, there is no PXE image here and it puzzles me that even after making a macrium reflect image it still failed to boot, But I think perhaps I shold have sone a complete sector by sector image, but at 1 hour to do, it just seemed faster to reinstall windows unless the rewrite of that image would have been much faster... (yeah it prolly would have been).

Anyways, in case I missed something somewhere, some pointers would be nice.

Things tried:startup repair, startup repair with the Windows CD, chkdsk /f, all of that. It was like maybe the MBR got jacked. that is the ONE thing I did not do actually was rewrite the MBR. Oh, and at one point after restoring the image I had the BOOTLOADER.exe is missing...


I think I will fire up Acronis next time for making a disk image. Macrium Reflect just took way too long.

Make yourself a recovery partition on your hard drive.

Acronis True Image, is a good call for building your image. Norton Ghost works as well, but Acronis is MUCH easier to use.. I have computers at home that use XP, Win7Pro, and Win 8.1. Acronis works reliably with all of them. So does Paragon Disk Manager.

I back ALL my drivers with either Driver Magician, or I do it manually.

I build a recovery partition that contains:

Disk image.
Office 2013.
Avast AV.
Spybot.
Malwarebytes.
Driver backups.
Firefox Portable.

That way, if I ever have to re-image, there's no problem.

I have a 3tb USB external drive that I also have images on.

I also have a bootable USB drive with disk image and restore software on it.

It's all about redundancy.

You can also use Win7's native disk imaging software to make an image that works reliably. When your Win7 computer asks you to set up "Backup", It wants you to make a disk image.

I use three different imaging programs. Each computer has three images:

One on a recovery partition (Paragon, or windows)
One on an external Hard drive (Acronis or Windows).
And one on a bootable USB drive. (Windows or Paragon).

That way, if anything fails, I have options.