I know all about choosing "Upgrade" by running setup from Windows, and doing a repair install/upgrade in place. However, the particular system will not boot, it crashes with a bluescreen. In Windows XP you could boot the install disc and do an "upgrade" which would preserve the system and make it bootable again. Windows 7 prevents this, if you boot the install disc it only wants to do a clean install. I really don't want to install this system from scratch if possible. What to do?
No, if you boot and choose upgrade, it says "to upgrade, you must launch setup from within windows" - which is my problem, because windows won't boot. I don't know why they even bother having the choice there.
Well that sucks. I tried every possible thing available from the repair options, including sfc, and that did not help. By the way, it is a virtual machine, "something" apparently corrupted a portion of the VHD rendering it unbootable. I guess my only choice is to mount the VHD, extract anything I want to keep, and rebuild the VM from scratch.
How so? If it were a physical drive, chkdsk /f and sfc would have likely fixed it; the same should be true of a VHD.
Delete the virtual machine (this does not delete the vhd, but you could make a copy just in case). Now create a new virtual machine with settings as close to the old one as you can remember. Now where you have to specify the vhd for the new virtual machine, select 'use an existing vhd' and browse to the old vhd. This has saved my bacon on several occasions. Hope it helps you too.
The last reply to this thread before today was over 3 years ago, I think that the issues have been resolved. Just sayin'.