BSOD/Crash on windows 7 load no safemode

Th3Stuntman

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Joined
Feb 22, 2025
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To be honest, I'm not even sure what to do at this point. I've worked on this computer for about 12 hours now or so? The OS is windows 7 pro, it had a full AVG package installed on it at some point in time. To be honest, I'm not sure if the subscription for it's service is even still going on. Anyways, let's start with the how we got to this point explanation.

This computer was/is pretty ancient, but we use it for our financials and never really needed more than what we had. We had a pretty serious power surge that actually blew up the surge protector and tried to start a fire. This of course, also blew out the power supply in the machine. The tower is pretty old at this point and honestly on it's last legs anyways. We had a perfectly working windows 10 machine in the shop. So I swapped the hard drive, thinking that would be that. Well wasn't I surprised, that's not what happened.

The computer immediately goes into a boot loop while trying to get into windows. Crashes on the windows loading screen. When attempting to boot to safe mode with command prompt it gets to avgardisk.sys, freezes a bit, then crashes to a restart. When preventing windows from restarting, I get a bsod about hardware changes.

Because I didn't want to lose anything on the drive after screwing with it, I went ahead and cloned it to another drive I had laying around. This of course, does the exact same thing, fails at starting past the avgardisk.sys. I have attempted to replace this file following a guide on where to get a new sys file. But this did not fix the problem.

I made a hiren's bootcd and attempted some disk utils there thinking that maybe the boot record or something was screwy. But I've found no such luck there as well. The only thing I thought was a little nutty was probably the original drive with the financials on it (a seagate sata) was in a frozen state. Not that I really have to worry about that at the moment, since I'm dealing with it's clone.

I've pretty much thrown everything at the wall at this point and I"m pretty close to saying screw it. Install windows 7 pro on another drive then transfer files over. But I'd like it if I could get the original up and running. It's about 12:30 am here atm, I'll probably be up for another couple of hours screwing with this, then I'll be back tomorrow. So please let me know what everyone would like to help solve this problem. Because I'm officially stumped.
 
Welcome to Sysnative forums!

Do I understand correctly you swapped a hard drive containing Windows 7 from another computer with a hard drive containing Windows 10? If so, that's bound to go wrong with completely different setups with different configurations, different drivers, etc.

You've not used the Windows 7 hard drive after the swap attempt and cloning it?

I would not recommend touching or meddling with system files or drivers using online guides, that's risky with potential for making things worse than they need be.

Are you able to get into the recovery environment?
 
Welcome to Sysnative forums!

Do I understand correctly you swapped a hard drive containing Windows 7 from another computer with a hard drive containing Windows 10? If so, that's bound to go wrong with completely different setups with different configurations, different drivers, etc.

You've not used the Windows 7 hard drive after the swap attempt and cloning it?

I would not recommend touching or meddling with system files or drivers using online guides, that's risky with potential for making things worse than they need be.

Are you able to get into the recovery environment?
So to add more details to better understand the current situation. PCA was a windows 7 pro machine, PCB was a windows 10 machine. I took out the hard drive from PCB and put in the hard drive from PCA. So PCB has the hard drive from PCA in it. I have a flash drive with hiren on it. I then put 1 more hard drive into the pc, I wiped it clean with Hiren utils then cloned the PCA hard drive to the new fresh drive so I could work on it without damage to PCA's files.

The cloned drive has the same problems as it's original (PCA windows 7 pro)

edit, forgot to add, I'm unable to get into a recovery environment using the windows 7 os.
 
To get the PCA drive working on PCB, you'd have to reinstall the operating system all over again. As I mentioned, they're completely different setups. You can't put a Windows 7 drive on a computer that's normally running Windows 10 and expect it to boot successfully. You can use PCB to access PCA drive as an external drive.

Can you get into the recovery environment (not safe mode with command prompt) from PCA with the PCA cloned drive? Normally Windows automatically boots to it after a few failed boot attempts.
 
no I can't, it'll crash after attempting to load the driver avgardisk.sys. The original drive that PCB had in it, is no longer there. So it's main operating system is now windows 7 pro that was in the PCA computer.
 
Why do you need to install this driver, perhaps, that is the reason it's crashing
I'm not trying to install the driver, it's already present in the file system as it's a clone from the PCA computer running windows 7 pro. So everything that was installed there is present here. Including AVG which I'm beginning to wonder if that might be the problem. Somewhere in the back of my brain, something is tickling back there, reminding me. Something about AVG, but it eludes me in my sleep deprived state.
 
I think the only thing you can do is to get another harddrive and install windows 7 iso image > HERE
And start brand new.
I'm beginning to think that's about my only option here. Install a fresh copy of windows 7 then transfer all of the files over. I'm just worried about quick books being funky. I think everything else would work just fine. Just a total pain in the butt, I'm also frustrated because I feel like this should just kind of work and it doesn't lol
 
I'm going to head to bed, I have a game plan for tomorrow to install a fresh copy of windows 7 and attempt to copy everything over to the new os installation. I'll check this thread tomorrow first though, just in case anyone has any ideas on how to solve this problem.
 
no I can't, it'll crash after attempting to load the driver avgardisk.sys. The original drive that PCB had in it, is no longer there. So it's main operating system is now windows 7 pro that was in the PCA computer.
I noticed what I'm describing is for Windows 8+, not Windows 7.

Follow the guide from BC, which I believe should get you to the right screen: How to start the Windows 7 Recovery Environment. From there we can start removing AVG and continue from there.
 

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