Windows 7 partition hanging after messing around

[felisimo]

Hello good people.

So, it's going to take a while to explain the chain of events leading to my current problem, I know it's convoluted and long but please bear with me and I will try to explain it as best as I can.

My dad's pc has 2 hard drives: an old drive from which he created a clone ("new") a month ago, and the clone on which he has been working since.

They both have several partitions. Each drive has a partition on which win 7 is installed and one on which win 10 is installed, and he's only been using the new one for the past month.

Yesterday, he was trying to back up a .pst file from win 7 (probably not very important). Upon completion, he used partition magic 8.0 (what he's always been using) to switch to the win 10 partition, but something went wrong and win 10 couldn't load and instead we got a "something went wrong :(" blue screen which then lead us to some of win 10's troubleshooting tools - none of which worked (they all threw some kind of errors).

Ironically, while you might think that is what I was gonna ask about, it is not, because since yesterday we've made matters even worse.

Don't ask why, but today we used the same program with which my dad cloned the old hard drive - "Acronis" - to delete the contents of some unused partition from the new drive. We thought that

it might help us with something but it didn't, and what followed is pretty bad. Upon leaving Acronis and trying to boot again (back to the win 10 troubleshooting tools) we suddenly got a black screen

with the msg "No operating system found". It seems that for some reason, after deleting the old unused partition, that partition was somehow set to be the active partition.

At this point we connected back the old hard drive (which is working fine) and entered win 7 to take a look at the disks and partitions inside the Disk Management tool.

I think the partitions of the new drive got completely messed up. For one, none of the partitions had a drive letter next to them. Additionally, the active partition was indeed the empty one which we had deleted

(I don't understand this topic too much but I am pretty sure the partitions are not the way they're supposed to be, just from comparing them to the old drive). So, I looked around google and tried to use DISKPART (via cmd).

With diskpart I was able to do 3 things:

1. Change the right partition to be the active one (the leftmost one).

2. Assigned the letter E to the volume that represents the new hard drive - after which the letter E appeared next to the right-most partition.

3. Set the "info" attribute of that volume so it wouldn't be "Hidden" (I thought this might solve the issue).

After that I tried to boot from the windows 7 partition (the one I set to Active) of the new drive and indeed the logo of windows 7 appeared(!!!) but got hung on the splash screen.

I don't know what else to do and could really use some help. Here are some relevant screenshots:

As you can see, Disk 0 is my faulty new drive, and it's left most partition is the one I set to active using diskfrat...but win 7 just hangs when I boot it.

The right-most partition (454 MB) for some reason is the only one that's associated with volume E.

Disk 1 is my old drive which works fine.

 

 

 

This is a screenshot from DISKPRAT showing the partitions I have on my old drive, and the details of Partition #1 which is working and booting my old win 7.

 

 

And lastly, this shows the partition on my new drive, as well as details on Partition #1 which is set to Active but NOT WORKING

 

 

[xScratchHackerx]

Well first of all... why would you have windows 10 and 7 on the same disk????????????????????????????

Second of all... maybe windows 7 and 10 are conflicting with each other and causing errors?

im not too good with computers especially with partitions but I know that if you have two windows versions on the same system there is got to be some kind of glitching (or so ive heard)

[felisimo]

1 minute ago, xScratchHackerx said:

Well first of all... why would you have windows 10 and 7 on the same disk????????????????????????????

Second of all... maybe windows 7 and 10 are conflicting with each other and causing errors?

im not too good with computers especially with partitions but I know that if you have two windows versions on the same system there is got to be some kind of glitching (or so ive heard)

He works with customers, some of which have win 7 and some win 10, so he needs to know his way around both.

It has been working for a while now..there shouldn't be a problem.

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, xScratchHackerx said:

if you have two windows versions on the same system there is got to be some kind of glitching (or so ive heard)

i know that it definitely was a problem with 16 bit and 32 bit operating systems. getting 98 and xp to play ball together was tough 

[emosun]

1 minute ago, felisimo said:

He works with customers, some of which have win 7 and some win 10, so he needs to know his way around both.

It has been working for a while now..there shouldn't be a problem.

That being said there isn't a reason to have it on the same disk and two disks would be much smarter. For the sake of avoiding conflicts and increasing reliability that two disks will not fail vs one disk failing and taking out both OS's.

[ProjectBox153]

9 minutes ago, xScratchHackerx said:

Well first of all... why would you have windows 10 and 7 on the same disk????????????????????????????

Second of all... maybe windows 7 and 10 are conflicting with each other and causing errors?

im not too good with computers especially with partitions but I know that if you have two windows versions on the same system there is got to be some kind of glitching (or so ive heard)

Wrong. That wouldn't cause issues. I have drives with 6 or more versions of Windows (from XP to Server 2012 R2 to 10) and never had an issue.

[felisimo]

23 minutes ago, emosun said:

That being said there isn't a reason to have it on the same disk and two disks would be much smarter. For the sake of avoiding conflicts and increasing reliability that two disks will not fail vs one disk failing and taking out both OS's.

I'll recommend that he does that, but first we need to solve this problem..

[emosun]

14 minutes ago, felisimo said:

but first we need to solve this problem..

back up whatever data you need (or is left) off the two drives then reinstall 7 and 10 separately from each other.

From your initial description , you messed up those drives big time. There's no telling how much you screwed the mbr or extra small partitions both windows use. And since the drive is a clone there's also no telling how well the system actually got cloned in the first place , not to mention you left windows updates running which could have easily changed anything about how the system boots one specific installation. 

you best/quickest/smartest route , is to reinstall the operating systems separately , and stop trying to save this mess of partitions.