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Help with "Windows Explorer has stopped working" on Win7 startup

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I'm wondering if someone can suggest if/how ATI 2017 can help me restore my Win7 OS to proper functioning.  Here's the background:

A few months back I used ATI 2017 to install an SSD in my Lenovo ThinkPad laptop running Win7.   Yesterday the laptop blue-screened, and now when I reboot, I get a error message saying "Windows Explorer has stopped working" with a black screen.  Everything else is working, inasmuch as I can get into Task Manager and work from the command prompt.   However, I tried everything posted online about how to fix ths problem (Rerun explorer.exe, chkdsk, "sfc /scannow", etc.) but the error appears every reboot.  Advice at this point is to reinstall the OS, but I don't want to do that because I have documents on the drive, and besides I don't have the Win7 install disks.

I have the original hard disk used to clone to the SSD still installed in my laptop, running as a spare drive, and I can boot from that drive as well.   I'm wondering if there's a way to use ATI 2017 to restore OS files from the hard disk to the SSD with malfunctioning OS?  I don't want to clone again as I have the latest documents on the SSD, I thought it might be possible to just restore the OS?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

John Wygonski

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John, sorry to hear of this problem with your laptop and Windows 7.

Unfortunately, ATIH 2017 cannot be used to just repair components of your Windows 7 OS and attempting to use it for this purpose would only serve to probably make matters a lot worse.

If you have a full disks & partitions backup of the laptop from before the problem with Windows Explorer, then restoring the Windows 7 OS partition from that backup should resolve the problem, but would put you back to that point in time when the backup was created.

I would recommend creating the Acronis bootable Rescue Media and making a new backup image (separate to the old one if you have one) so that you could recover any of your latest documents etc.  This could be a Files & Folders backup if it is only user data you want to safeguard.

When you say you have the original hard disk (used to clone to the SSD) still installed and that you can boot from it, does your laptop have two internal drives installed, i.e. the old HDD and the new SSD drives?

Thanks for your reply, it points out that I should have been making regular backups--learning the hard way.

In response to your question, yes I have two internal drives installed which are the original HDD that I cloned from, and the SSD which became the primary boot drive.   Now I have switched to the HDD as the primary boot drive, and I can access folders and files on the SSD that I used to boot from until I started getting the "Windows Explorer has stopped working".

So maybe I can copy the new files and documents from the SSD to the HDD and re-clone?  

John, your situation is somewhat unusual in having the two drives in your laptop, and further so, in having two bootable drives each using the same Windows OS, as this is not normally recommended.

I would recommend making a full disk backup image of the HDD drive before attempting any further actions, plus make a backup of the SSD to protect any of your user data before you wipe it out by doing a clone.

Once you have the backups, then copy any of your user folders and files from the SSD to the HDD but please be very careful if attempting to copy any System files or folders as this could 'break' the HDD OS.

 

In addition to Steve's great advice, once you have backups, you could try an inplace upgrade of your cloned drive OS.  The upgrade process may repair the issue without removing your data, profile and/or apps.

You could also consider creating a new account on the machine and see if it has the same issue.  Sometimes, user profiles can become corrupted and creating a new profile and moving your data over may not take as long as rebuilding the OS.  

Definitely take backups of both drives "as is" as a precaution first though. 

Thanks for your advice and suggestions.   After days of logging on/off, running running chkdsk, sfc /scannow, etc. to fix the "Windows Explorer has stopped working", @Bobbo_3C0X1's suggestion of creating a new account prompted me to try to log in with another account on a local domain.   I could log in successfully and Windows Explorer worked fine.   So then I logged out and logged in again with the problematic account and now all is fine with Windows Explorer!

So now the first order of business is to do a full backup image of my SSD.  

Then, taking Steve's advice about 2 bootable drives with same OS,  I will reformat the old, original HDD boot drive to use for extra storage in this PC.

Thanks for your help and suggestions!

John 

John, glad to hear good news about the problem with Windows Explorer - user account problems can present in some very strange ways so is good that you had a 'spare' one to test with.

I would suggest making a backup of the old original HDD before you reformat it - or remove this first and test that your laptop boots correctly with just the SSD installed.  I have had issues with dual-boot systems where some vital boot information has been stored on a drive or partition I wanted to remove!