Robert in CA wrote:
The F8 worked to the extent of adding the Repair Your Computer
option to the list but it doesn't work. I've tried it twice now and each
time it gives me a black screen Instead of the System Recovery Options
and select the Keyboard Layout and scroll down to the Dell Factory Image
Restore according to the link you gave. It doesn't do any of that.

I suggest we use the Rescue CD and the fix boot problem to restore
the #3 hd back to the way it was so that it boots 'normally'. Then I will
repeat your instructions and perhaps this time it will work so that we can
achieve a clean hd and hopefully return to the ultimate goal of creating (1)
clone from the 1TB and then put the 2TB inside the 8500 and box the 1TB.

1) Boot the Windows 7 on that hard drive.
2) Open Administrator Command Prompt
reagentc /info
reagentc /enable
3) Reboot, pressing F8 and see if the top item is
now the "Repair Your Computer" thing or not.

Also if it's operational or not (no black screen).

Robert

If you want to Boot Repair #3, there's nothing wrong with
that. You can restore the Reagentc activity (Recovery Agent),
but seeing as it isn't configured correctly at the moment,
I would not be expecting Repair My Computer to work.

reagentc /info gives some information on what parts
are configured, but it's pretty hard for me to tell
whether things with GUIDs are ready to go or not. I
have done some simple repairs to reagentc, to get
recdisk working once, and that's about as much as
I've done to one. I could never be sure that what I'd
done, had restored all features or not.

I can't promise anything on boot sequence. Rebuilding the
BCD *should* put it back together, rather than using
whatever automated recovery sequence it's using right now.
Powering off the computer in mid-session, can trigger
automated repair activity, including changes to boot.

As for the analysis of "freeze", sometimes they're hardware,
sometimes they're an "AV calling for help". I fondly remember
installing FRAPS (screen capture program) while I had a
Kaspersky subscription, and the machine started flashing up
notifications as it got into a knife fight with FRAPS installer.
Soon (say five seconds), the machine was frozen tighter than
a drum. No mouse movement. It was power off time...

Now, later knowledge revealed why that happened. I wouldn't
have installed FRAPS, if I'd know what the installer was doing.
It was adding capture DLL files to every Program Files folder.
Kaspersky is well-familiar with this "pattern", as it's the
pattern of malware :-/ And once Kaspersky was "under attack",
it froze the machine to stop the attack. When all it had to
do is just kill and quarantine the installer.

That's an example of a limited first hand experience, with
having an AV present.

There are also a few different ways to make a clean OS for test.
Using the "Repair My Computer", was supposed to give us a
clean OS complete with drivers for the hardware. It was supposed
to remove some of the tedium of system setup (as ready as Dell
could make it, at the time).

You can also make clean OSes by using a Windows 7 DVD and
installing that way, but then the OS won't have drivers.
And you'd need to have made the recovery disc set, to have
the possibility of an "easy" CD with drivers on it. My
Acer laptop made a recovery disc set way back when, and
I think one of the discs might be the drivers disc. I might have
needed the network driver off that.

My intention was not to "build an entire environment from
the ground up". I just wanted something to test with, to
try to tell the difference between bad hardware and bad software.
You passed a memory test.

Depending on the kind of malware present in a room, we haven't
been nearly careful enough for "worm" equipped malware. My effort to
make a clean OS, in the presence of real malware, would be
a waste of time. My hypothesis at the moment, is there's nothing
nasty in the room. Malwarebytes is still impressing us by
snagging a PUPS for lunch, so it hasn't been destroyed by a
powerful pest.

If you want to shore up #3 and work with another new disk,
that's a good plan. You keep track of the inventory, which
disk is a keeper, which disk is suitable for experiments/tests.

Paul