I have a Windows 2008 R2 machine that won't boot anymore. I'm trying to get it back up, so I don't have to configure a new setup. There are no backups of the main system, only data. It's not crucial to get the original setup back up, but I would like to see how far I can get. The symptom is that when booting up it shows the Windows logo for a few seconds and then goes black. Normally, it should then start showing the mouse pointer on the black background, followed by the grey login screen. It just stays black. It's not clear if it encounters a corrupted file that hangs it or a corrupted part of the registry or something else.. What I have tried so far (from a setup disk and from a freshly installed parallel system): - safe mode won't boot it either. - bootlog shows flpydsk.sys as the last driver loaded, followed by a lot of other not-loaded drivers. Comparing it with an older log seems to suggest that it looks like a normal log. The information in the log is very very scarce, to put it mildly. - chkdsk found and repaired errors on the system partition. There was one bad sector and I assume that was the main cause of the problem. During the last few days the machine kept getting offline and drives weren't detected by the BIOS after that. I had to remove and reattach the SATA cables to get them detected again. After the machine didn't boot up I also changed the SATA ports. It's also possible that the first two ports had a problem. - I tried sfc with the /offlinexxxx directives, but (after a while) get a message that it couldn't do that operation. Unfortuantely, there's no reason given. I'm wondering if this could be caused by a mismatch of the OS versions? The freshly installed system is based on 2008 R2 with SP1. I don't know if the crashed system is based on a DVD with or without SP1 (I couldn't find the DVD I originally installed it from, so I downloaded a new one from MSDN). Is there a way to check this? It is obviously not sufficient to check for file versions, because that doesn't say anything about the install media. - what other manual system repair options are there? Thanks. IEFAQ: http://iefaq.info

Hi, There was one bad sector and I assume that was the main cause of the problem >> If there is a bad sector, you may need to perform a full disk check before you try to repair the operating system.

Hi, There was one bad sector and I assume that was the main cause of the problem >> If there is a bad sector, you may need to perform a full disk check before you try to repair the operating system.