Windows 7 64-bit boot problems (hangs on logo, crashes on logo, startup repair does nothing)

[Jack Nitro]

OK, dd won't work, so now I'm simply trying to use Linux's cp command. Figures it would give me yet another obstacle:

jack@jack-Studio-1735:~$ cp -r /media/OS* /media/Expansion-Drive
cp: cannot create directory `/media/Expansion-Drive/OS': Read-only file system

Can someone who knows a thing or two about Linux help me? How do I make my expansion drive (/dev/sdb1) read-write? I've already tried "sudo chmod 777 /dev/sdb1"

 

[Joe C]

have you tried another windows pc and slave/connect the drive to that? You can also get The Ultimate Boot Cd and use GParted's gui to get the data you need (no command lines required, just mount the drive you want)
Ultimate Boot CD - Overview

 

[Jack Nitro]

have you tried another windows pc and slave/connect the drive to that? You can also get The Ultimate Boot Cd and use GParted's gui to get the data you need (no command lines required, just mount the drive you want)
Ultimate Boot CD - Overview

Yea, but wouldn't I have to copy the entire partition if I used GParted? which means overwriting my Expansion Drive's partition? Which means bad stuff would happen?

Besides, I need to make my External Drive Read/Write in Linux for more reasons than just backing up files.

 

[Joe C]

Photorec, Test Disk, GParted and several other programs are also bundled in Parted Magic, Photorec allows you to recover files, docs and of course pics. Parted Magic also has an option use the .EXT2./.EXT3 file extension (amongst just about any other file extension you can think of) so it should be compatible with any *nix distro
Parted Magic is in the Ultimate Boot CD, you have nothing to loose by checking it out

 

[Jack Nitro]

Here's an update on the latest developments of my ever more frustrating OS debacle:

I managed to make my expansion drive r/w in an annoyingly simple way, by simply installing the ntfs-3g drivers that I was missing through Ubuntu software center. From there, I didn't even need to clone my OS partition - I just copied all of the files over to the free space on my Expansion Drive. There were a handful of files that failed to copy, but nothing that seemed all that important.

Now I've wiped the internal drive and it's ready for a new windows installation. I downloaded and burned an image for Windows 7 Home Premium x64 from Digital River, Microsoft's official dl partner. However, when I select the unused partition and commence the install, I get one of the two Errors:

Both of these errors happen when the install gets to the "expanding files" stage, and it at least made some progress at that. So as far as I can deduce, it's a problem with the install disk. I don't even want to think that it could be a problem with the hardware.