Won't boot into Windows or Safe Mode

[jak834]

Can’t boot into either on Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit. I made a Repair Disk from a Win 7 Home Prem 64 bit ISO and it came back, This version of System Recovery Options not compatible with this version of Windows.
Of course, System Restore was turned off on the friend’s comp. Tried Last Good Configuration, with no luck.
Ran the Repair option on the 7 Recovery page but it said it couldn’t repair.

After many attempts the computer finally booted from the Repair disk! But I’ve run it about 10 times now with restarts and still won’t go to desktop or Safe Mode.

One time the System Recovery Options box showed Win 7 location as C:
The next time it showed it as F: This last time it’s showing it at E:
Each of those was labeled as the Local Disk.

[jak834]

Doing another Repair cycle and this time after the repair it looked like it was going to boot into Windows.
But this message came up:
Win 7 user profile service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.
And then it froze on Logging Off.

[jmarket]

Hi @jak834 and welcome to PCHF

Sounds like you need a clean install. If you can’t boot into either system, and a repair disk won’t work, a clean install is needed.

[jak834]

Forgot to mention that what started this was my friend saying there was a new profile needed to enter Win 7. Her old one wouldn’t give access. When she brought it to me, then it wouldn’t boot to desktop or Safe Mode.

So now finally the comp has booted to the Win 7 user login screen. Showing two users. Hers, which still wouldn’t let me in.
And a new one, Other User. I tried just hitting enter without a user name or password. No go. I put in ‘admin’ and ‘password’. No go. I tried Other User and password. No go

[jmarket]

Does it say Wrong Password?

[jak834]

Yes, says wrong password or user name.
Friend had stopped by earlier and had me type “net user administrator /active:yes” and enter to make admin acct active.
Did that and it came back, “User Profile Service service failed to logon. User profile cannot be loaded.” And then it went to Logging Off.

[jmarket]

You need to re-install the OS. There’s no way to resolve it if you can’t get into System Restore and have it successfully get back to a previous point. Not being able to even log in rules out any possibility of fixing it manually.

[jak834]

You can’t by chance pull hdd and run it in another Win 7 comp with usb adapter and run repair that way?

[Bruce]

pulling the drive and USB’ing it to another PC via an external enclosure would be the way to recover the personal data.
but any ‘repairing’ of Windows will use that systems OS as the baseline.

you are best to recover any data while you can and do a clean install of Windows.
and with all the trouble you have had, probably can’t rule out a failing (or infected) drive.
if the drive is a few years old, and budget permitting, consider a new one.
and maybe also take the opportunity to do all this on a SSD instead and relegate the current drive to a secondary role so all the data would still be there for retrieval.

[jak834]

Actually there’s two hdds and one must be a SSD! It’s much thinner and narrower.

Thanks for your help. We’ll backup and clean install.

[jmarket]

Actually there’s two hdds and one must be a SSD! It’s much thinner and narrower.

Or maybe a 3.5 and 2.5 inch hard drives?

Will mark this thread solved, should @jak834 still require help with this issue in the future please contact a staff member who can reopen it for you.