Repair Windows 7 on a 2013 iMac with USB 3 issue

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Repair Windows 7 on a 2013 iMac with USB 3 issue

Hi. I have a corrupt Windows 7 parition on my late 2013 iMac that Disk Utility can not seem to repair. My best guess is a the 'Repair Windows' from the install disc upon booting up will fix the issue. The problem is....my 2013 iMac only has USB 3 ports available and from what I am reading it appears Windows 7 does not support USB 3. Therefore....my external CD drive is not being seen, nor are my keyboard, mouse, or anything else via the USB 3 ports (I also tried a bootable flash drive with the neccesary Windows files on there). I even went as far as making a bootable SD Card and trying to repair from that, but I still can not utilize my mouse and keyboard to advance through the prompts.

I did not have these issues when I installed it using Bootcamp because I am guessing bootcamp supplies the neccesary means to allow the USB 3 ports to be recognized. But Bootcamp does not have a feature for repairing windows. It is only giving me the option to remove Windows.

Is there anyway I can repair windows using my Windows installation CD on an iMac by means of using USB 3 ports?

Thanks in advance.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Apr 17, 2014 10:08 AM

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Answer 1

EIV

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Nov 13, 2014 12:57 AM in response to simmer209

For attempting to repair a Windows 7 partition you need to be able to boot into Windows setup indeed. The complication is that Windows 7 installer has aged and does not support the relatively new USB 3 standard.

I can only this of one approach which is by downloading the available Windows ISO and use USB instead of your DVD. It is kind of a long shot and does have its risks, but I'll describe it high-level nonetheless:

- Using Boot Camp create an USB with Windows 7 edition you run as well as the appropriate Windows Support Files from Apple

- From OS X or the Mac's Recovery Console you could shrink your HFS+ partition for about 3 GB to create some free space

- Insert an additional primary partition in this free space and format it FAT

- Sync this GPT change to MBR manually using fdisk and reboot into OS X

- Pre-copy the Windows PE driver folder onto this new FAT partition to overcome the USB 3 issue

- Reboot in legacy bless'd mode to your USB recovery stick

The Windows setup screen should display an option to repair instead of install... Your mileage could vary depending on the type of corruption(!)

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