ASUS CG series

[mizhepzibah]

I have an ASUS computer with two hard drives: first drive has Vista, which is working fine, and second drive has 7 with win explorer constantly restarting. I have gone through the process of trying to repair and also go back to a restore point; I have also tried disconnecting everything extraneous. It seems the OS is corrupted, but I have lost the discs that I used to install it, so can't use them to repair. I bought a repair USB thumb drive, but don't have the option of booting from USB on the boot menu, only "boot from removable device" which doesn't seem to work. I think that if I can get to the activation key information that's stored on the E drive through the C drive, I can download a repair. Any suggestions?

[patio]

Disconnect the Vista HDD and boot to the win 7 USB stik and do a repair install...after all is good you can re-connect the Vista drive.

[patio]

PS...to boot from USB you need to enter the BIOS and set USB as 1st boot device.

[mizhepzibah]

I am sorry to say that I spent the majority of the day trying to use the repair stik to do a repair install to the 7 drive, but was not successful. Once the Vista drive was disconnected, the 7 drive was not accessible. The error message said "insert boot media and hit any button," but doing that only caused the error message to repeat. I finally figured out to hit F8 at startup, which got me to being able to choose the Patriot USB. Using the stik, I was given the same five options for recovery that I found on the 7 drive itself (none of which made any difference).

Doing a little more research, I found a program which displayed the key for the OS I have on the 7 drive--do I now download an ISO file? I'm not sure what exactly that is, but I'm not ready to erase what's currently on the drive. I'd appreciate whatever guidance I can get at this time.

Thanks.