Googling revealed this is be Avast. I know it had flagged some known installers and old files that should have been safe (one was a google installer from google), and I let it fix them automatically so it would stop flagging them (and the items were innocuous, some even long deleted since they were old installers)
Big mistake.
May or may not be why my system is unbootable. Cannot get into safe mode either, stops at ASWRVRT. A windows update was installed prior to this problem, and as far as I could tell was successful (system successfully rebooted, I let everything install but never logged in). That was the only new software in the system. A new ATI graphics card was installed while the system was off and before the system was discovered to be unbootable, but nothing points to that being the issue. I would still like to clear out catalyst if possible, however. I have heard it causes lots of problems if not cleared, but I have personally only had minor issues easily resolved in Windows with it when I install another ATI card, which is why I didn’t bother to scrub them out.
I tried a rollback, and that only made my system more unstable. Days of work undid the boot sector damage caused by the rollback and Windows repairs. I can still get into recovery mode, but not safe mode. Ran chkdsk, everything checked out. Could not run sfc. Tried to clear it out with dism.exe command, but all that did was change the drive letter. Still got the same error about ‘system repair pending’, and dism.exe now gives error 0x800f082f. No log was generated, the one available is from June. I gave up at that point.
I ran an FRST scan, and attached the log. Please help me clean out Avast, I hope that will fix this! (punkbuster is also in this log, by the way. Keep an eye out for it. I heard it causes problems with Avast.)
It is set to AHCI. It won’t detect the hard drive at all if I select IDE. The only other option is RAID, but I dont have a RAID set up.
Last night I tried moving the boot drive to the SATA 1 port from the SATA 6 port. I also used a different SATA cord. No luck. Booting without other drives attached also changes nothing.
The src command does not run. I get the error “There is a system repair pending and requires reboot to complete. Restart Windows and run sfc again”.
I tried running the “dism.exe /image:C:\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions” command to clear the error out. It gives the error “The scratch directory size might be insufficient to perform this operation. This can cause unexpected behavior. Use the /scratchDir option to point to a folder with sufficient scratch space. The recommended size is at least 1024mb.” Then a message about reverting pending actions. This is odd, as there is plenty of room on the SSD the OS is on, as well as 16GB of RAM. I plugged in a nice big USB stick and added the command "/ScratchDir:H:" right after dism.exe and before the rest of the code. It worked for a minute, then threw up an error message. “Reverting pending actions from the image… Error: 0x800f082f An error occurred reverting the pending actions from the image. For more information, review the log file.” I tried a few more drives with the same outcome, as well as placing that new syntax in different places. The log file is no help, the only entries from the same day in June. After a bit of chasing, I got a series of errors telling me many commands on DISM are not supported by Windows PE. I am assuming it is referring to the fact I am running Premium edition of Windows 7 (64-bit) I also found some articles mentioning that this command I found will not work when actively running the copy of Windows being repaired, but I was unable to get the proper syntax combination to work it on a running copy of Windows.
I have been working on this for hours, I will make this post now and try again with my live disk.
Finally got a log out of DISM. It was logging to the boot (X:), not the C: drive. My fault, I am pretty inexperienced in troubleshooting with DOS, so I am learning with each step.
Please see attached.
Even running the dism.exe utility from the boot, pointing at the image on C:, I cannot get anything to run. I tried sfc again pointing at x: for the bootdir, with the same error as before. Stuck now, I will see if I can make any sense of the log.
This was my biggest fear. This will be the fourth Windows 7 install on this system in roughly 5 years, each time it failed to boot for bizarre reasons. Every single time has pointed to permissions getting messed up. Twice I had to take control of my extra drives to access them, even from a fresh Windows 7 install from an administrator account.
Why does that keep happening? It always happens after I upgrade the system (add a new harddrive, etc.) or once from a regular Windows update that went haywire. What am I doing that causes permissions to go nuts? No one else uses this system, so there are no unaccounted changes with bad permissions. Everything is done as an administrator, and UAC is kept on.
editing to add the sfc log files I dug up. CBSC was copied from the C: drive, CBS was copied from the boot. I think they are the same.
