Help! after power failure system wont boot

Regk

Senior member
Apr 14, 2009
298
4
81
Ok so after the last big storm/brownout we had in my area, my old dell optiplex 760 finally caved. I swapped out all the internals, tested the psu and no luck... (I upgraded the system from a Pentium D, 1GB ram, 80GB HDD to a C2D E6600@2.4GHZ, 4GB DDR2 800, 1.5TB WD Green drive, and a radeon 5570 LP. I luckily kept all the original parts...) I managed to kijiji an optiplex 780 for 75 bucks that is a nice little upgrade over the old one(Wolfdale E8400@3GHZ, 4GB DDR3, ESATA). I tested the old hard drive in an external enclosure, and thank god all my documents, files, pics, etc are intact. I put the old drive in the new machine, went to boot it up, and BSOD as the windows logo comes up (running Win 7 ultimate 64 bit for over 6 years) the system then just keeps looping in repair mode. Steps I have went through since the BSOD loop:

1. went into the bios and ensured that the drive was set to AHCI (tried the other modes as well, no luck)
2. tried to boot to last known good configuration, no luck
3. tried to load safemode, and then with command prompt, the system would hang on CLASSPNP.sys
4. ran memtest to verify the ram was good
5. tried to do a restore to an earlier point before the power failure
6. tried to do a system repair off the windows CD, it would not allow me to, getting an error message saying my version of windows is incompatible...
7 . I attempted to run chkdsk /R d: appeared OK
8. I attempted to run sfc /scannow /offbootdir=d:\ /offwindir=d:\windows. (, it mentions I had some corrupt files but windows was unable to fix.
9. About to smash the machine with a hammer lol...

Anyway, Im hoping you might have some tech guru magic you can send my way, If not my plan is to load win 10 on my spare 1.5TB drive and slowly start migrating all my pics/data over.. however I have 10 years worth of data to dig through on the old drive, if I can get it up and running I swear I will clone that puppy to have a spare ready to go!

I would appreciate any other suggestions you may be able to offer!



Thanks!
 
Last edited:

Ketchup

Elite Member
Sep 1, 2002
14,545
236
106
Going from a Pentium D to a Core 2 isn't the hugest jump time wise, but still pretty substantial hardware change.

This usually happens when Windows runs into hardware it just can't handle driver-wise. Could also be going from IDE to AHCI mode. To see if that's the issue, changing that setting in your BIOS should give you a pretty quick answer.

If that's not it, a repair install of Windows is your best bet. Here is a guide:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html
 

LTC8K6

Lifer
Mar 10, 2004
28,520
1,575
126
Q43 chipset in the 760
Q45 chipset in the 780

I don't know if that would make Windows choke?
 

Regk

Senior member
Apr 14, 2009
298
4
81
Hi Guys,

no diagnostic lights, and i have never had a system choke on a HDD swap like this :(
 

dionasaur

Member
Nov 2, 2009
84
0
66
I personally think you should go with your latter option with installing Win 10 and transferring the files over. It sounds like the easiest road to go with less headaches.

I ran into something similar and gave up with troubleshooting and just reformatted the partition my windows installation was on to save myself the frustrations. :)