Stuck with black screen of death

[Mephesto]

When you attach the VHD with diskpart a new drive should be created.

Yes, I did that.

You could try Shadow Explorer on that drive, but it might be that the only way to access the content of the Shadow Volume is with a symlink.

ShadowExplorer doesn't work because I have system restore turned off (I don't need system restore on this temporary drive).

System Restore Explorer (http://nicbedford.co.uk/software/systemrestoreexplorer) is better for this purpose but it's just a GUI of that vssadmin/mklink command. Same problem.

[nic2k4]

ShadowExplorer doesn't work because I have system restore turned off (I don't need system restore on this temporary drive).

Then it wouldn't work on a shadow volume located on another drive. Did you create the drive image after the failed Win 7 restore? That could explain why you get a corruption error with VSSadmin.

[Mephesto]

Yes, I don't have any other drive image of Windows 7, the most recent is the XP one right before the upgrade.

[nic2k4]

Well it was a long shot anyway, Shadow Volumes are differential backups so what you would retrieve has a good chance of being incomplete. At least you have a good image of XP, just convert it to VHD and run your XP programs in MS Virtual PC.

[Mephesto]

Differential backups... fücking perfect... so Windows now wants to run like a VM and imitate Deep Freeze. Ripoff #6029301.
This'll be really goddamn annoying...

[nic2k4]

It's only a pale imitation at best. This is why programs like acronis and todo backup are so important; the maintenance tools are barely up to the task anymore. On the plus side, Windows is much more secure than it ever was. Only one piece of advice, turn off automatic updates. In the past year there has been a number of updates that have caused problems, at one point it was a monthly occurrence. Updates happen on the 2nd Tuesday of the month, I usually wait until Friday to do updates, it has saved me getting potentially bad updates installed and a whole lot of pain. If you do get a misbehaving update try to uninstall it (GUI or CLI) before resorting to system restore. That's not going to help when Windows won't load even in safe mode, hence the imaging software.

[Mephesto]

I have had automatic updates permanently off for XP for 13 years without a problem and I should've done the same with 7 as well but I was an idiot.

I guess my only choice left is trial and error. I'll have to replace all system files with one from a clean install (except registry) until the culprit is found, of course all done on a VM. So does anyone know how to bypass these annoying access denied errors? I tried taking ownership of the entire Windows folder and it's not doing shit. I wonder how this permission mess even works. Someone on another black screen w/ cursor thread said the solution was to reset default permissions. So hopefully these permission statuses don't actually screw with the system files or registry.

[nic2k4]

Just came across this while looking for something else

http://superuser.com/questions/592401/can-i-uninstall-a-program-or-driver-from-windows...recovery-tools

You will need to use the command prompt from the recovery environment.

[Mephesto]

I don't have a pending.xml on the broken C drive.

And how do I remove these permission obstacles?

[nic2k4]

There's this way

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753659.aspx

There's also a program that does just that, I just can't remember the name.

Ok, not a program, a registry hack

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-take-ownership-to-explorer-right-clic...menu-in-vista/