- Joined
- Dec 27, 2008
This worked when all else failed: http://www.pcworld.com/article/243190/how_to_repair_a_corrupt_windows_7_installation.html
A client brought me an old emachines desktop with a very corrupted and broken installation of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit. Malwarebytes found over 20k of infectious elements and Avast bootscanner found a bunch more plus many corrupted archives. SFC /scannow reported that it found broken system files but was "unable to repair some of them." Of course, the Windows updater was broken and the update history showed failed updates all the way back to 2012. IE 9 was installed and I could not get past that to get IE 11 in place. WSUS offline was unable to get the update problem fixed. There was high CPU and high disk activity which as we all know is associated with the broken update issue.
This computer had six or seven different active user accounts and the 750 gb hard drive was almost half full. Looked like none of the users had ever done any house cleaning to delete temp files, old downloads, etc. I mention this because it made the repair process painfully slow. My client was unwilling to let me do a from scratch reinstall because she and the other account holders would lose too many apps whose installation media they no longer had.
The fix linked above took about 36 hr. to complete. The client did not have the install media of course but I just happened to have an unused copy of Windows 7 Ultimate retail laying around in my shop that I was able to use for this. Someone had given it to me a couple of years ago. The computer had Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 installed but the install media I was using was pre SP1 so I doubted it would work but it did. All the user accounts are still in place.
Essentially, this is the same process that we used to use in order to do a from scratch install of Windows 7 when you only had the upgrade version (as opposed to the full version) of Windows 7. Remember that? You would install it twice so as to use the first installation of the upgrade media as the temporary base . The second install would then be the upgrade. Remember that?
I'm now in the process of installing updates to get it up to SP1, at which point the updater will likely be broken and so when I get there I'll revert to WSUS offline to finish the updating.
A client brought me an old emachines desktop with a very corrupted and broken installation of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit. Malwarebytes found over 20k of infectious elements and Avast bootscanner found a bunch more plus many corrupted archives. SFC /scannow reported that it found broken system files but was "unable to repair some of them." Of course, the Windows updater was broken and the update history showed failed updates all the way back to 2012. IE 9 was installed and I could not get past that to get IE 11 in place. WSUS offline was unable to get the update problem fixed. There was high CPU and high disk activity which as we all know is associated with the broken update issue.
This computer had six or seven different active user accounts and the 750 gb hard drive was almost half full. Looked like none of the users had ever done any house cleaning to delete temp files, old downloads, etc. I mention this because it made the repair process painfully slow. My client was unwilling to let me do a from scratch reinstall because she and the other account holders would lose too many apps whose installation media they no longer had.
The fix linked above took about 36 hr. to complete. The client did not have the install media of course but I just happened to have an unused copy of Windows 7 Ultimate retail laying around in my shop that I was able to use for this. Someone had given it to me a couple of years ago. The computer had Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 installed but the install media I was using was pre SP1 so I doubted it would work but it did. All the user accounts are still in place.
Essentially, this is the same process that we used to use in order to do a from scratch install of Windows 7 when you only had the upgrade version (as opposed to the full version) of Windows 7. Remember that? You would install it twice so as to use the first installation of the upgrade media as the temporary base . The second install would then be the upgrade. Remember that?
I'm now in the process of installing updates to get it up to SP1, at which point the updater will likely be broken and so when I get there I'll revert to WSUS offline to finish the updating.
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