Windows 8 Startup Repair Issues

[Jared]

I don't know about you guys, but I'm finding that trying to get Windows 8 to boot after a crash is a nightmare. Customer had a drive which had some slow reading sectors. Imaged 100% without one single unread sector (including the recovery partitions). But despite this I can't get it to boot by any means short of a clean restore from scratch. Start up recovery just hangs, system refresh gets an error and quits.

When it tries to boot it keeps getting errors about missing system32 files. I copied all of them over from the recovery partition, but now it just gives some other error message that makes no sense an bluescreens out.

 

[pclab]

My beloved XP... You could reinstall it over the old system and solve it...

What is the exact message??

 

[Jared]

I donno, first it was missing some werkernel.sys file (which I pulled from the recovery partition) then it was another file, after a while I just copied the entire system32 folder over from the recovery partition (skipping the files that existed). Now it tries to boot but just BSODs out with basically no explanation.

I've given up on it. Only reason I was trying was because it was a 100% clone on a drive that just had slow sector areas. My guess is that someone ran chkdisk on it before they brought it here, and it screwed up the OS beyond repair.

I'll have to just to a full factory restore and copy the files to it.