My laptop dual boots Windows 7 and 10. I keep Windows 7 due to there being no Windows 10 drivers for either the web cam nor USB3. Hey, the system is going on nine years old.

Anyway I lost the USB3 port in Windows 7 and, trying to get it back, seemed to have messed up the Windows 10 side of the dual boot to where it would blue screen every time I tried to launch. Since I had just made an image of the entire 1TB drive a week ago I decided to just do an Acronis image restore using an Acronis Recovery CD. It failed to restore the image (on an external drive) three times. It would fail trying to delete partitions leaving the Windows 10 partition as unallocated space and the other partitions intact. I also have an image on another external made with the Windows built in imaging software but didn't bother to try... I probably should have done so.

Since the drive is close to nine years old I figured that it went bad but, since I had been messing and the system seldom gets used, I pulled the drive and attached via a USB drive dock to my main system. I then went to drive management and removed all the partitions (Win 7, Win 10 and shared data). I then setup the drive as a single partition and ran all the Sea Tools diagnostics available. The drive passed all tests so I mounted it back in the laptop and tried another image restore which went without a hitch.

My thought is that the MBR probably got messed up and the image recovery could not figure out what was what. Wiping and setting up the drive again fixed the MBR solving the restore error. Am I off base or does this sound reasonable?

As an aside it seemed odd that there were 5 Windows 7 Important and one Windows 7 driver updates available. Remember that the image was only a week old... At the time the image was created there were no available updates.

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Leaving aside image recovery, that sounds reasonable to me, a corrupt MBR has happened several times over the years that i've run Windows for no other reason than it happens.

If it happens again maybe try to repair/rebuild your MBR first?


That is a bit alarming and may be your issue, i've only had MSE definition updates and Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool updates since end of Win7 life... there was an Edge update on 9th July but that didn't cause me any issues.

Fwiw and likely irrelevant, i deleted my Win10 partition because it caused issues with my Win7 partition months ago... as you know i'm not a fan of Win10 so ymmv.

Well today is Update Tuesday, so you never know what they have for you.

Came through today on my main system but not yet on my laptop.

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Hmmm, got a few updates on another Windows 7 install yesterday. Got Malicious Removal, Accumulative Security and a batch of .NET Framework updates. This was on a system that I dropped back to Windows 7 a few weeks ago due to it's getting too old to run recent versions of Windows 10 without issues; about 8 years old.

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I remain to be convinced that installing Win10 anywhere near a Win7 install, no matter how it's done, is a good idea.

I guess that 'rolling back' from Win10 to Win7 if an Upgarde were carried out might force an update on Win7, but my experience of Win10 has never involved any form of Upgrade, my installs of Win10 have always been on seperate partitions and/or drives and yet no matter what i tried they don't sit well together.

Whether or not that's down to the hardware or software i use i have no idea, for the time being i prefer not to have Win10 installed at all.

Actually I've been dual booting between Windows 7 and 10 on my laptop using a shared data partition without issue Since Windows 10 came out. The Windows 10 partition was originally Windows 8.1. Can't remember if I went to Windows 10 as an upgrade or clean. Well, for years except for the recent issue that started this thread and I believe that was self inflicted. The setup is three partitions on a single drive as follows in order:
Windows 7 partition
Data partition
Windows 10 partition.

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I no longer have any machines running Windows 7. My two oldest systems are being used for testing the Windows 10 Insider Preview releases and both systems started out with Windows 7 on them and were upgraded. I've not done a clean install to either, though the tablet went through a restore back in the early days of Windows 10 pre-release testing when one of the builds failed on it. They are both doing fine, albeit not as snappy as my newer systems. My wife's machine is also using Windows 10 and it was an upgrade from Windows 7.

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stephen boots
Microsoft MVP 2004 - 2020
"Life's always an adventure with computers!"

I almost never use the Windows 7 side of my laptop, Steve. Also, my second system was strictly Windows 10 until the newer builds just didn't run well enough.

Actually a new build is in the works, probably late summer. Haven't decided whether to save some money and just build a new second system or to build a new main system making the current main the new second.

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The only machine here that was an upgrade to Windows 10 was my Asus laptop but that came with Windows 8, which had been upgraded to 8.1.1 before being taken over by 10, all the other machines here came with 10.

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Joan Archer
http://crossstitcher.webs.com