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[Urgent] Windows 7 Won't boot after Grub screen

3K views 7 replies 2 participants last post by  Raptor-21 
#1 ·
Hello, new member here, sorry to jump straight into my problem to need urgent help as I have work I need to access on my windows partition.

To the problem: I have absolutely no clue as to the cause, but directly after selecting windows 7 from my grub menu, I get stuck on a black screen with a flashing cursor in the upper left corner of the screen (like '_' found in terminal) I've tried leaving it like this for at least half an hour in hopes that it may load but no luck. Luckily I also have Ubuntu installed on a separate partition of the same harddrive (leading me to believe that it isn't a hardware fault) But when I try to access the windows partition from ubuntu I get the following error:



No idea what it means but seems something has gone wrong with the partition that Windows 7 is on.

This seemed to happen while I was away from the computer, I had left it running with Firefox open while I went downstairs to have dinner, upon my return I sound the Ubuntu logon screen displayed (ubuntu is default operating system to load from grub menu) So that about leaves me where I am now, trying to find a solution.

Not sure if it helps, but here are some specs:

Acer Aspire 5739G
Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 2.1GHz
Nvidia GeForce GT 130M
4GB RAM
360GB HDD

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium and Ubuntu 11.04

Any help is greatly appreciated and I hope you generous folk are able to help me fix this! Thanks!!
 
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#2 ·
Sorry to double post, I couldn't find an option for editing my original post. But thought I'd also post a screenshot of the HDD as taken from Disk utility:



The 262GB Acer partition is almost full (about 2GB free space left) Not sure if that makes any difference. In addition, I have been hibernating the computer a lot while games were running, again, just throwing info out that may help diagnose the problem.

Thanks again!
 
#4 ·
The only win7 disk I have is an upgrade disk I received from Acer (laptop originally had Vista) Would this work? There is also an option on the GRUP menu for an ACER recovery thing, but that only gives me the option to format hdd which I want to avoid at all costs. If I can find the upgrade media disk I shall try that and see if it works =]

Thanks
 
#5 ·
whatever you do, you may want to backup any files you have in windows you cannot afford to lose, You can do that through ubuntu.

If the upgrade disk you received from acer is just a standard oem upgrade, then maybe you can use it. Go ahead and boot to it and see what options it gives you.
 
#6 ·
Well tried the disk, no luck, I get the same blank screen with flashing cursor that I described when trying to boot windows. When I eject the disk it goes straight to the grub screen. And yes, I would like noting more than to get to my data, that's all I really care about, if I have to format partition and reinstall windows so be it, but the problem is, I can't access the data from Ubuntu, I get the error message show in the op when I try to access the windows partition, do you know of any way round this? With my primary concern being data recovery as opposed to fixing windows as I don't mind reinstalling.
 
#8 ·
Thank you very much for this find, it seems to be the exact problem I am having. The last post seems to be describe how they fixed it:

Okay, I got all my data back with help from a pal!


First off, we needed to be able to start Windows with sdb connected. The only way we could do this was to use Ubuntu's gParted to delete the dodgy partition and then Windows was happy to boot up with the raw drive.

Next, my pal used his installation of Active@ Partition Recovery to "superscan" the drive. It reported three overlaid partitions but it was easy enough to identify the one I wanted and APR cheerfully restored the required partition. Unfortunately, the partition appeared to be empty but my pal knew better and, after a bit of thought about what he did last time, he rebooted Windows.

chkdsk ran automatically during boot and, after it had done its usual thing, it spent a long, long time fixing file security IDs. When it was finished, Windows completed its boot routine and I was delighted to see that every last one of my files had been restored!


There's more to NTFS than meets the eye, methinks.
But I have a few questions; am I right in thinking, that based on what is said above that if I use GParted to delete the windows partition (ACER, shown in screenshot above) that Windows could potentially boot properly?

2nd, after having deleted the windows partition, I will definitely be able to recover all data from that partition using the above mentioned program, then rebooting windows and running chkdsk?

Don't want to seem thick headed, but it is absolutely imperative that I can recover the data from my windows partition as I have lot of Uni work on there that will be near impossible to redo, most of which isn't backed up anywhere (my own fault, I know)

Thanks again for your help =]
 
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