O
OrionManufacturing
Guest
Back in the day I could boot from a Windows CD and install/repair over an existing installation in order to correct any problems. Now if I try to do that with a Windows 7 disc on top of an existing Windows 7 installation, it tells me to boot into Windows first and start the process there. How can I do a repair install of Windows 7 if my existing install of Windows 7 is too broken to launch the install from within itself?
Among other problems, the Windows 7 DVD setup fails when run from inside my OS with an error 0x80070490 indicating that I don't have sufficient space of ~860MB to run the installation (nonsense: I've quadruple checked and I have over 400GB). For this reason and related reasons I am trying to do a repair install.
My main question is the first paragraph of this post, but I will provide additional background to my situation in case anyone has any insight:
I have a Windows 7 box running 2x 500GB SATA HDDs in Dynamic RAID 1 (Windows 7 software RAID). I was experiencing lots of Hard Drive strangeness for a month until one Drive finally decided to fail in a detectable fashion. I replaced the drive and reinitialized (resynchronized) the RAID.
Since then, the system does not work correctly. Namely, installations or updates of software always fail with various errors (probably the same reason the Windows 7 setup fails). Some programs won't start at all (such as Internet Explorer). I can run Firefox or Chrome and successfully download files, but trying to install anything I download always fails.
To be certain I have run what virus or malware scans I already had installed (though some also fail) and found nothing. I've run surface sector scans on both disks several times with no problems found and I have run chkdsk several times with no problems found. My best idea right now is that some critical system files got corrupted when the RAID was failing, and that has carried over to the new plexes. So I'd like to try to do a repair install before I give up and start over from scratch, but I need to be able to do that install without launching my broken OS.
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Among other problems, the Windows 7 DVD setup fails when run from inside my OS with an error 0x80070490 indicating that I don't have sufficient space of ~860MB to run the installation (nonsense: I've quadruple checked and I have over 400GB). For this reason and related reasons I am trying to do a repair install.
My main question is the first paragraph of this post, but I will provide additional background to my situation in case anyone has any insight:
I have a Windows 7 box running 2x 500GB SATA HDDs in Dynamic RAID 1 (Windows 7 software RAID). I was experiencing lots of Hard Drive strangeness for a month until one Drive finally decided to fail in a detectable fashion. I replaced the drive and reinitialized (resynchronized) the RAID.
Since then, the system does not work correctly. Namely, installations or updates of software always fail with various errors (probably the same reason the Windows 7 setup fails). Some programs won't start at all (such as Internet Explorer). I can run Firefox or Chrome and successfully download files, but trying to install anything I download always fails.
To be certain I have run what virus or malware scans I already had installed (though some also fail) and found nothing. I've run surface sector scans on both disks several times with no problems found and I have run chkdsk several times with no problems found. My best idea right now is that some critical system files got corrupted when the RAID was failing, and that has carried over to the new plexes. So I'd like to try to do a repair install before I give up and start over from scratch, but I need to be able to do that install without launching my broken OS.
More...