I bought a Windows 7 machine with SSD as boot drive this year & upgraded to Windows 10
Turning it on this morning it started grey screen updating saying do not switch off, then we get a power cut 🙁
Now all I get is the Gigabyte motherboard screen & then a flashing cursor on a black screen (you can’t enter anything at this screen)
The only way I can get anything is by forcing it to boot from DVD with the Windows 7 disc it came with (this looks like it wants to install W7 from scratch – I’ve not proceeded past this point) If I proceed with this, will it then upgrade to W10 & I’ll be OK
The other thing I’m finding is can you make a good W10 boot sector on a USB stick on another PC & use that to repair the original?
Any help appreciated.

If you’ve got access to another PC you can create a Windows 10 boot media and use it to either re-install or attempt to repair the existing install.

The Win10 install is licensed by a hardware id collected by MS so you shouldn’t have any problems with activating it if you do need to do a reinstall; but hopefully it won’t come to that !

Windows 10 media

Yes – best option imo is to boot from a W10 disk and then do the repair option. Should be intelligent enough to figure out what happened.

If you had backups set, there’ll be a recent system image it can go to. You did have backups set, didn’t you?

If you’ve got access to another PC you can create a Windows 10 boot media and use it to either re-install or attempt to repair the existing install.

I’ve downloaded the file from that link on to a USB stick with a W7 machine but it looks like it wants to alter settings on the PC rather than make a boot partition on the USB stick, its not my PC so don’t want to go any further – I thought it would download a useable boot section.

Its a newish PC not used for much at the moment, I fitted a 2TB conventional hard drive as additional storage that I was in the process of transferring a load of data files & pictures on to – there won’t be much on the C drive thats important.

You did have backups set, didn’t you?

Don’t know, do they come set as standard?

Don’t know, do they come set as standard?

Nope; probably worth looking into it once you’ve got your system back up though ! 🙂

Unless it’s a hardware failure caused by the power failure you’re probably ok. Let’s assume you are for the moment 🙂

I’ve downloaded the file from that link on to a USB stick with a W7 machine but it looks like it wants to alter settings on the PC rather than make a boot partition on the USB stick,

The “media creation tool” is what you need. You don’t copy it to the USB, you run it and it creates the USB installer.

Right, copied the .exe media creation tool to W7 PC, run it & try to write it to the USB stick but the USB doesn’t appear in the drive selection list?
Tried formatting the stick & different stick.

Wht does windows explorer show?

Wht does windows explorer show?

You can see it in there & PC puts pop up on screen when you insert USB, tried three different ones now all bigger than the 4GB minimum it asks for.

They aren’t sandisk usb sticks by any chance ? (There’s a known issue where the drivers prevent the usb stick showing in the media creation tool)

The workaround appears to be to use the tool to create an .iso image and then use rufus (https://rufus.akeo.ie/) to write the iso to the usb stick.

They aren’t sandisk usb sticks by any chance ?

No Verbatim

I’ve used Rufus & have got 3 files on the USB, one called autorun – I assume this is correct.

3 files – doesn’t sound like enough to me; though I could be wrong. Have you tried booting off it ?

What files are they?

Autorun.inf isn’t for booting, afaik.

autorun.inf tells the OS which file to execute when you insert removable media.

What are the other files?

Have you tried booting off it ?

Still at work until 15.00, PC is at home.

I’ve only got access to network dumb terminals at the moment & they only show one file called LOCALE that contains 25 files on the USB but they usually don’t ‘see’ system files.

I’ve got a W10 USB key here with 32- and 64-bit installations on it. The root directory shows:

autorun.inf
boot
bootmgr
bootmgr.efi
efi
setup.exe
x64
x86

x64 and x86 are the two images. Each has:

autorun.inf
boot
bootmgr
bootmgr.efi
efi
MediaMeta.xml
setup.exe
sources
support

No Cougar nothing like those files, but I tried it & the USB only gets me to a Command prompt.

The Rufus program had many options, 32 or 64 bit, Fat32 or NTFS etc – I just left them a ‘default’

I can now get to safe mode options screen with my W7 CD but it looks like it wants to either upgrade or new install of W7 & asks where I want to install – would that be the boot sector of the C drive (there are numerous options & I can’t be sure they’ve not been created by W10

If you can’t boot from the USB then it’s not created it properly. I’ve had trouble with getting these things going in the past…

You don’t want to be cocking about with a W7 DVD on a W10 install. Nothing good will come of this.

Where are you geographically, is it practical to get it to me?

Or me, I’ll help too 🙂

Devon but off to Portugal tomorrow – I’m sure I can sort it if I can get it to boot off the USB

there’s a good guide to making a bootable USB win 10 here. it talks about the win10 technical preview but the principle is the same. pretty sure i used this to get one going a while back ( beginning of last year! )

If you get the .ISO image, I’m pretty sure Microsoft’s “Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool” will work with Windows 10 images.

if I can get it to boot off the USB

It’s not booting that’s the issue, it’s creating the pendrive.

You could always burn the .ISO to a DVD, of course.

Might need to fiddle the boot options on the MoBo firmware. I recall having to do something like that with my laptop/computer last time I had a problem similar.

Used some google-fu to seek out the correct steps.