Help please, novice error committed

Hi
I'll cut a long story as short as possible.

I was running a digital audio workstation with Windows 7 and decided to install Windows 8 on the same hard drive.

After about a week of tediously installing about a million programs and plugins and satisfying myself that everything worked, I wanted to remove the old version of Windows 7.
Not sure of myself I asked my brother who told me simply to "just.delete the ' Windows.old ' folder"

So I did but, apparently, I should have known to use the disk clean-up utility. My brother says he was stressed out at the time or he would have warned me.


Anyway, I restarted.Windows a while ago and was confronted by the message "disk read error".
Obviously my boot sequence is still looking for the Windows.old folder.

I really do not want to reinstall Windows, and presumably all my applications, so could somebody please give me some alternatives?

Kind rewards

P

Hi Big P,

Now, I'm no expert but I'm having trouble directly associating your act of deleting that windows.old file causing a disk read error. However, since you haven't provided your specs, I have no alternative suggestions at this time but if it is a manufactured system build, you might want to see if they have any built-in diagnostics that you can run.

Also, could you please confirm that you upgraded from Win 7 to Win 8 and that is why you had the windows.old file present?

Hi Big P.

Welcome to the forums!

I don't see any reason why deleting the windows.old folder will cause you to get a "disk read error". I know you should run a scan on your disk to see if there are any corrupted files on your computer. Perhaps one of the Windows 8 gurus here can tell you how to do that as I am not really all that experienced with Windows 8. You can try googling how to do a scandisk on windows 8 in the meantime.

Good Luck!

Snarks

Just deleting the Windows.old folder would not cause this. The Windows.old folder is just a backup of your previous install. There isn't anything in there that your current install needs to run.
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/26095-repair-install-windows-8-a.html?ltr=R

They are all correct. Deleting the Wondows.old folder did not cause this issue.
Disk Cleanup does the exact same thing, so there would be no difference between using either method.

I would try the repair advised above.

Also, if you can get the make and model of your Hard Drive, I would download their Diags and run them to see if the HDD is bad
Keep in mind that Hard Drives can go bad at any given time,, from 5 min of use to 30 years. There is no telling when they can or will go bad.

Well, I believe your account could be correct. I think I remember seeing a situation in Windows 7 where the system was set to boot through a Windows.old folder instead of the current install. I have also seen installs that needed the DVD in the drive to boot.

Hopefully, running a repair will help your situation, but if it doesn't, let us know. If it tells you a Restore is needed, first try cancelling out of that and let the system reboot. There are some situations where Windows 8 does not know it has actually done the correct repairs.

If it doesn't work, I would suggest either using Diskpart from the Recovery Environment to check the drive for partitions or a Third Party partition manager, like Partition Wizard. Having a good picture of how the drive is set up could be helpful. It may take something as simple as a Bcdboot.exe command to get the system booting again.

Also, make sure your bios is set to boot to the correct device.