Recovering win 7?

[vlad01]

I should know how to do this, but kinda stuck in a dillema.

My main desktop has slowly been dying over the last few years, so weird issue with the motherboard or the CPU that acts like bad slots for the PCIe and RAM too, mainly ram.

No errors or anything, just nothing happens when you start the PC, lights on, nobody home kind of thing.

What sets this off is if the mains is switched off. Once you get the PC to start, it works flawless as long as the power remains on at the wall, shutdown and start up work fine like this.

But my desktop is at the farm at mum's and I haven't bothered taking it home as we have moved 4 times in 4 years because the builder won't f**king finish the house, 4 years and still not done. So things have been in limbo for a while and I still have much of my stuff there.

My plan was to build a new PC... in 2017, but life got in the way in all areas so I can't afford to upgrade.

I finally had enough trying to start the PC by re-seating the ram and GPU while on, it's the only way it get it to start and usually takes about 10-20 attempts. Only worked when on for some reason.


So I ripped the board out yesterday and downgraded to my old high end gaming board and CPU from 2008-10 and it fired right away, actually still have that for sale on ebay as retro hardware Might have to remove that.

Now the issue is win 7 BSOD right away as the CPU architecture it totally different, AMD FX back to a more conventional design of the Phenom II.

I normally just run the win 7 install DVD and repair windows but I get an error saying that the version is different and can't be repaired. Not sure why, I never updated win 7 from that DVD other than a few of the critical CPU vulnerabilities from recent years and that malware that was infecting all kinds of industrial equipment, can't recall the name of it now. I never had windows updates turned on, so I don't know why it's complaining about an incomparable version, so it could only be from those patches.

I could do a fresh reinstall but I have not been able to backup all my stuff as the PC was playing up too much to be able to reliably do that without potentially bricking everything. I don't have a 2nd PC to be able to plug the drives in to back them up either, everything else is a laptop too new to have SATA or anything helpful.


I looked for a win 7 media creation tool, I swear I even had one on this very PC, but the internet insists one never existed.

But I know I made one or had the stuff to do one for a Ryzen build that never eventuated on a USB stick, but now being so long I am sure I have reused that stick elsewhere.

I reckon a current win 7 version on USB should work for the repair, but I haven't been able to find one.

One of you IT gurus might know more than I do?

Appreciate any help.

[pman92]

Is a SATA to USB adaptor a thing? Plug the drive in and backup the data to your laptop?

[vlad01]

Yeah it is, but two problems, I think last time I looked they were around 40 bucks, the 2nd issue is that my laptop has less storage that my desktop by a long shot, but my desktop has two drives, one is backup, so I would need dual SATA adapter or to run two of them.

My laptop being HP has sketchy as hell USB ports, breathe on them an they drop out, so that will corrupt everything for sure. Already bad enough for real time tuning. I think I even had issues with the USB C, my phone would not stay connected more than about 10 sec on the USB C, not at all on the normal ones.

The only thing other than win 7 I could try is win 10, that should in theory allow me to install on this old hardware, win 11 won't allow anything older than around 2020 in most cases, BS move by MS. I think a few have hacked their way around that but I don't have the energy to do so.

At least with 10, CD keys are cheap and legit, 7 was one of those things you had to crack or get your hands on a OEM key, or mod your bios for TPM to allow cheap/free OEM installs to work.

Pretty sure mine was a cracked OEM, it never asked for a key iirc. Been a while since I had to reinstall or do fresh one. 8-9 years or something? 7 is incredibly stable.

I have had to reinstall from scratch on my laptop win 11, it's a 2021-2022 model, my partners actually.

As for 10, I assume it has enough smarts to do a fresh install and move over all the old stuff intact? Have not done an install like that since Vista days from XP, and it was sketchy at best then, hoping it would be better now?

[vlad01]

Bit of a google, doesn't look great for win 10, most say it crashes on install for Phenom CPUs or if it does work, there are no drivers for anything on the motherboard. Being one of the last nvidia nForce chipsets made,I'd say my chances for drivers are extremely slim. So a repair of 7 is looking to be the only option without another desktop to swap drives around in.

I'm sure it will work if I have the latest 7 USB installer. DVD isn't much help as the burner is in the stuffed PC and none of the PCs I have, have a DVD burner. Unless my old Toshiba one from 2004 can do DVDs? I'll have to check. That still works, it was my tuning laptop but the battery always sucked in that, max 10-15 min.

[pman92]

Pretty sure you can install and run 10 and 11 without activating it at all. Just get a notification pop up and you cant change your desktop background from memory.

[antus]

You can run win 10 and 11 without a key. But you cant install 11 on an older PC without TPM-2 without hacks. The hacks work, but MS might compile a future update for a newer generation of CPU minimum and kill the install at anytime, so you end up owning the risk.
If you have 7, 10 or 11 iso files you can use rufus to make a bootable installable USB, and it has the options to remove the TPM or min ram checks from 11. You can download win10 with the MS tool, or by hacking the user agent in your browser to a non-windows OS. Or you can go looking for it on archive.org and once you have the file search the md5 and/or sha1 hash and check that it shows up somewhere trustworthy as the legit hash of the iso you were looking for.

Edit: thanks, zack4200, that is what I was trying to say

[zack4200]

Small addition to antus' reply - Rufus can also do bootable USBs

[vlad01]

Thanks guys, Antus is helping me a bit privately, he also suggested Rufus and it worked great first go. I did end up finding the win 7 USB creation tool but it always failed at the end of the process when it got to stage of making it bootable. MS is so useless

I might also point out that MS pulled all older OS ISOs from their site and associated tools, low move in my opinion.

I managed to find archived ones elsewhere but had to check the checksums to make sure they were the real deal and not something dodgy.

Found an ISO for the last updated version of 7 at August 2020. So I'll give it a shot and see what it does.

Could also end up changing the board out to something a little newer and better than what I have thrown in there, and load 10 on, but I think I'll give 7 repair a go first.

[vlad01]

Thanks guys, Antus donated an old board and CPU from around the same era, an old Intel i5 and surprisingly started up and ran fine from the previous AMD one, just some driver woes I had to sort but it all worked in the end the same as before, no windows recovery, re-installs etc needed. All data retained and nothing lost.

Thanks Antus! and all those that helped.


The older good board with the Phenom II x4 was a dead end anyway as windows just refused to cooperate and only a format and reinstall being the last option. I think it was something to do with this board not being UEFI and probably ACPI related missing features that this particular install relied on. The intel board had all that and worked out of the box, some driver woes due to the no availability of most of the drivers on the internet, but the DVD in the box had the missing ones I needed. So all worked out