How to Repair Windows 7

[HappyAndyK]

This tutorial tells you how to Repair Install Windows 7. At times, you might encounter a situation, where your Windows installation gets badly corrupted and even running system restore, system file checker, or trying other troubleshooting steps, does not really help, and you start thinking of re-installing your Windows operating system.

But before you consider doing a Clean Install you could try and perform a Repair Install. This will preserve your user accounts, data, programs, system drivers etc and yet put back your Windows in good condition.

Check out this nice tutorial by MVP Shyam on how you can do it.

If you are looking for small Windows fixes, use our Windows freeware FixWin. It is a 529 KB freeware portable application to repair & fix common Windows annoyances & issues. FixWin detects whether you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista installed and accordingly offers you the relevant fixes only.

[eric solas]

This Repair Install presumes that you can get 7 to at least boot in Safe Mode. Is there any way to fix a system that will not boot at all, without having to reinstall everything? Failing that is there any way to reinstall on a second drive and recover programs and data /

[DustinH]

There is a way. You can run the Startup Repair from the Windows 7 DVD. This will fix some problems that cause it not to boot. If that does not work, you can install Windows from the DVD but DO NOT FORMAT the drive. Your old files should be moved to Windows.old where you can recover them as needed. Also, installing on a second drive is easy, too. As a precaution, I'd unplug the first drive so it doesn't accidentally get formatted or erased. Once your new Win7 install is complete, plug it back in and start recovering the files. Some directories may need permission to access, but that's easy.