tip: inplace reinstall

Hi All,

Got a frantic call yesterday. The windows screen comes and
it reboots over and over. This was on their Windows 7 mini
file server and their business was down.

Oh Crap. I do hate these kinds of calls as it usually
means their hard drive bit the dirt, but not always.
Windows does have issues in this area.

So I booted into my Fedora Linux stick and checked the hardware.
Everything was fine, including the hard drive. Bullet
dodged.

Then I booted into my Windows 7 USB3 enabled installer stick,
chose repair, and command prompt (PE Mode).

sfc /scannow /offbootdir=D:\ /offwindir=D:\windows

Fixed the issue.

Note. C: gets moved to D: in PE mode. C: is the boot stick.
If you enter the wrong drive letter, you get (we won't go into
how I figured this out):

sfc windows resource protection could not start the repair service

To get a list of drives from the prompt:

wmic logicaldisk get volumename,name

Or just do it the lazy way and enter
dir D:
and see what crashes


A good reference to in-place repairs is:

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-repai...-reformatting/

Hope this helps someone else,
-T