Heavily corrupted Windows 7 install - running out of repair options
I have an old laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit whose harddrive got randomly corrupted sectors. It was so bad that most backup software kept failing to perform a backup, even though it could read it (though it seemed specific areas of the drive were damaged, rather than the entire drive or just randomly failing).
Anyway, after weeks I recovered about 95-98% of the data and rebuilt drive and it's partitions on a new drive using another PC. Unfortunately, many of the damaged files were system files, including a great deal of System32.
Now, I am well aware the system would not be bootable in this state, I tried using a Windows Home Premium 64 install disk to run the recovery applications, but none of them are working.
Startup Recovery (not that I was expecting it to) was unable to fix it.
I tried booting into the command prompt and running "SFC /SCANNOW /OFFBOOTDIR=E:\ /OFFWINDIR=E:\Windows" (E being the partition on the HDD the recovery console mounts it as) but after a few minutes I get the message "Windows Resource Protection could not start the repair service".
Anything I attempted to Google expects you to be on the Windows desktop itself, not running off of the boot/install disk, to fix this or other issues.
I am running out of ideas. I know I can reinstall Windows using the "upgrade" option (possibly) but as I said, it's an old laptop, so I am trying hard to avoid having to just re-install Windows, and thus risk the chance of it basically reinstalling as a clean slate and me having to hunt down several-year-old drivers, remember how it was configured and reinstall/reconfigure everything.... and I don't remember where I put the CD key for it as I bought Windows 7 for this thing the day it came out.
Any ideas?
