Windows 10: Something on my windows 7 partition prevents win10 upgrade or boot

Well, look at post #12....

 

I am going for the upgrade if I can get win7 to boot in ah I, which it looks like I'll be needing that post to get working now. Thanks for the help, I'm not cut out for this after all.

 

And in my excitement I failed about until I get a blue screen. I had the remnants of an install start up but wanting to be safer I cancelled it and went to boot 7 which now goes bsod due to ntfs. Fun. I'll get past this I hope

 

go back to IDE mode to boot into windows 7, then follow the steps in link in post 12

You can also google IDE to AHCI Windows 7. I think once you get everything running in AHCI mode you will be OK

 

That is where I bsod. For record, I tried AHCI normal boot once, it hung, tried safe mode, gets stuck at atipcie64, change bios, bsod. Going to unplug the ssd and see if I can recover win 7

Edit : just realized the cancelled 10 install now says setup rollback... Maybe that needs to run?

Edit2 rollback says it couldn't recover previous windows. Seems I've screwed the pooch hard on this one. Safemode just bsod.

Atm trying startup recovery, which in my experience is a joke but last resort time.

 

Ahhh.... but you still have the image you made of Windows 7 using Macrium reflect, right?

Disconnect the Windows 10 SSD. Set bios back to IDE mode. Boot Macrium Reflect USB. Restore the image to the Windows 7 hard drive. Reboot.

Or, if the Macrium Reflect USB won't boot with Bios in IDE mode then try booting it in AHCI mode. After you do the restore, then switch the Bios back to IDE mode and see if you get back into Windows 7. Then do the safe mode method of changing the bios mode to AHCI.

If you get Windows 7 to boot in AHCI mode, what I would do then is install the SSD, but do not boot from it - boot from the Windows 7 HDD. Use Macrium Reflect Free to clone the Windows 7 HDD to the SSD. Then boot into Windows 7 on the SSD, with the old HDD disconnected, and upgrade that to Windows 10. Then if that all goes well, reconnect the Windows 7 HDD.

 

Holy... You are right. I didn't even think of it... Wow. Just wow. Thank you so much for your help and time.

 

That's why we make images of what we want to keep before we go mucking around in uncharted territory See my edit to post #19

 

Working on AHCI 7 atm, but I wanted to ask why you recommend the ssd clone?

 

From my understanding, you want to end up with a Windows 10 with all of your data/programs/settings kept from Windows 7? Basically you want to operate from an upgraded Windows 7 anyway, not a clean install of Windows 10. I would do the clone to the SSD first and make sure Windows 7 is operating properly on it, then upgrade to Windows 10 on the SSD. You maintain the Windows 7 on the HDD as a ready and easy backup to fall back to if something goes wrong with the upgrade. Once you have the Windows 10 running on the SSD, then it's a simple matter to reformat the old Windows 7 HDD to use for storage and you still have the previous Windows 7 image saved.

Once cloned to the SSD - disconnect the HDD for the upgrade. That way you don't end up with the boot files accidentally on it and have to fix booting after you reformat the HDD.

 

I didn't really want to use the ssd for Windows, but it looks like I may have to. After getting 7 on AHCI I tried the upgrade from the hdd only to land on the good old spinning dots forever issue. I assumed this would work as 10 finally booted with that drive in, but it just won't have it. I have some stuff I'll just transfer off the ssd if it comes to it, sadly.

 

Going to try an offline upgrade with the other drives out, might pull my network card too

Seems install media still sticks at the spinning dots.

I think I see what we did and how it worked the one time, after I set AHCI it couldn't read the win 7 partition, letting me boot, the win10 install I cancelled was a fresh install as well. Now that win7 works in AHCI the ssd install doesn't get past spinning dots or recovery.


So I am trying to clone my 215 gB win 7 install over to the 232 gB ssd and macrium tells me not enough space? Nevermind this, drag and drop was the key.

So I cloned the drive, Windows doesn't boot without the original drive. Tried to use macrium with only the ssd in and it freezes like it did with the original drive in.

 

I'm afraid I'm out of ideas. The only thing I can suggest is to try things with the minimum amount of hardware connected. It definitely sounds like a hardware/driver issue. I am curious, though...if you have an SSD - why isn't that what you would want to use for the operating system?

 

Stubbornness to my old way. Thanks for your time.

 

Got win 7 to boot on ssd, upgrade still fails in the same fashion. A couple odd things I found along the way, mbr is 500 megs for a 230g partition, Windows recovery from USB does not like my 7 install, says not a compatible version even though I uses that USB to install years ago. At this point I tried to go back to clean windows 10,but it wouldn't boot right so I reinstalled it, hopefully it will boot once I drop the storage drive and then I need to find a way to format that broken partition...