Post Win 10

[BobH]

After destroying my desktop system by attempting to install Win 10, I was finally able to get a version of Win 7 HPE running by using the W7 upgrade disk to load it. At the prompt to chose a normal or custom install, I chose custom and a completely knew Win 7 was created; however, I did not put this on my SSD but chose an internal HDD that is in the boot path, thus preserving the Win 7 folders and files that Win 10 saved. The system boots - not from the same disk that the old Win 7 is on - but without essential elements being recognized, such as the network adapter, et al. Also, none of my apps were preserved in this copy of Windows.

The good news is that I can now use File Explorer, Control Panel, et al. I was able to confirm that the SSD has a folder that contains my Win 7 as it existed prior to the aborted Win 10 install attempt and the even worse rollback attempt.

Does anyone know if it is possible to activate the old Win 7? If it is, I will be able to recover most of my system and preserve all of the apps installed therein. I lack any specific knowledge about how the boot process works. My guess is that there are ROM commands that work with system configuration files to start the os on a cold boot, but I do not know if that is correct nor, if it is, what specifics are involved. Again, my guess is that the Registry is stored in the Windows folders and is loaded at some early stage of the boot process. If that is so, then the old Registry should be preserved in the pre-Win 10 Windows folders.

Can anyone point me to information about the Windows boot process works or how to re-establish the Win 7 os that was preserved as a step in the Win 10 install? Everything I've found so far depends on having Win 10 installed and functional. I do not have that luxury; so I would have to be able to re-establish the pre-10 Win 7 from a newly created but somewhat crippled Win 7.

[JoeP]

Other than restoring from an image, the only way I know to get the old copy of Win7 functional is to rollback from within Win10.

Joe

[Jay Freedman]

The article at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... S.10).aspx describes the BCDedit.exe program, which might help. The comments are especially interesting. Other useful references are http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/26 ... w-use.html and http://sourcedaddy.com/windows-7/how-to ... dedit.html. You'll need to use the /store parameter in every command to specify that you're working on the BCD store in the old Windows 7 partition and not the one in the new Windows 7.

Another way might be Easy Recovery Essentials, which claims to fix PCs that won't boot. It costs USD19.75 for the Home version. I don't have any experience or knowledge of this program.

[viking33]

Take a look at EasyBCD.
http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
It's a powerful little freebie program that is a software utility for Windows that lets you control and configure the BCD/BOOTMGR bootloader for Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8. It's been a handy tool for me and has dug me out of a few deep holes in the past.
It's advanced page is shown in the screenshot below.

Easy BCD.JPG

[JoeP]

Neither of those is going to help get his old Win7 install which has been archived into windows.old functional.

Unfortunately, I think his only recourse is to backup his data off the Win10 drive, do a clean install of Win7 to the Win10 drive, re-install all the applications, & then restore the data.

Joe

[BobH]

Thanks for the suggestions, Gentlemen!

I am suffering from a lack of so much knowledge about how the Windows OS boots that I have probably become delusional. I'm thinking that there must be a predefined sequence of processes that must take place. From what I've read, the first step is POST. I think POST instructions reside with the BIOS in ROM. Somewhere at or near the end of a successful POST, control must be turned over to the next process which I think must be a file read to access the MBR (for an NTSF drive). With the knowledge of the existence of a file system (and probably some testing of its validity), the loading of the Registry and the kernel can proceed in a predefined sequence. During the process, there must be a process looking for and responding to keyboard presses such as F8 thus allowing the user to choose from the list of modes to tell the kernel what point to halt and wait for further input. All of this is conjecture from reading different descriptions of how an os is loaded, from Wikipedia and other web articles.

Of course, I might be full of %^*! - which is highly likely.

However, if there is such a procedure and if all of the Windows 7 components were indeed saved and do indeed exist on my system drive by the Win 10 install, then there should be a way to step into the boot process much like stepping in to Safe Mode and directing the process to the 'good' information. Having committed the unpardonable sin of once having been a mainframe programmer and later the information officer responsible for everything from soup to nuts in a DP shop, I find it difficult to believe that Microsoft developers do not have the means to control the boot process as I believe it would be necessary for effective development of os changes, upgrades or rewrites. Besides, if the developers built a facility into Win 10 for rollback, that HAD to have developed a procedure for it. Perhaps it depends on having an os on the system drive from which it is being performed (as in expecting Win 10 to be running and replacing itself on the same partition - a ring job with the engine running, as we used to say). I would very much like to have access to that information.

Again, I'm probably wrong; but before I go into the painful process of trying to do a clean install and recover all drivers, applications, files, etc., I want to exhaust all avenues.

Thank you once again for the input. I'm staying in the hunt for a while longer.

[JoeP]

The rollback procedure deletes all the Win10 system files, restores all the Win7 system files to their original locations, AND restores the registry back to its Win7 state. This is all very much non-trivial. There is not necessarily the appropriate structure in the Windows.old folder to be able to redirect the boot process and have any successful execution much less having all the required Win7 registry entries.

Joe