If I begin back in October last year, my Computer shut down without giving any error, the following day I come to boot up and the machine stalls at the blue windows loading screen.
I tried safe mode, last know working, I tried the recovery software that was supposed to be on a partition on the drive but was missing... The windows recovery disc said it had fixed the problem, it still wouldn't boot.
I installed Ubuntu to an external device and made a backup of the drive to an image file and I was able to mount the partitions of the image.
The SSD manufacturer (Kingston) suggested that I do a secure erase on the drive and re-image the drive and if it works the problem was physical and bad blocks on the drive and doing a secure erase will over write all writable and on formatting again the drive would have all bad blocks marked and replaced. I downloaded Hirens CD. Although the image burn was good and it verified both with the write and checksums, it was a coffee cup coaster claiming that the PXE was missing at first run.
I tried various attempts to either find how to fix the drive or the image file, so I bought a HDD to replace the SSD and imaged the HDD and tried booting, this time it got a bit further, stalling and telling me that hal.dll was missing, research shows that hal.dll missing claims are MBR related.
Ultimately the need is to get windows up and running so I can use my software and so I can dual boot the machine, until then its pointless me doing anything in the Ubuntu install quarter other than use this install I am currently using.
So what next? Does anyone have any ideas on where to go from here and suggestions of a fresh install are not an option, I have lots of data and programs that I downloaded and paid for on that drive and I can't use them or access data unless the drive boots or the drive image can be used in Virtual Box, only problem there is the drive image is ssd.img and Virtual Box won't accept it not an extension name change or append.
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