Upgraded BIOS now Windows 7 will not startup - urgent

[jgplarnold]

Hello
MY first post and I am becoming desperate.
Today I downloaded version F8 and upgraded the BIOS using Q-Flash after firsdt allowing Q-Flash to make a copy of my current BIOS.
It all finished successfully but when I rebooted my system firstly I got the Gigabyte flash screen and then the system automatically rebooted and then the Windows flash window appeared briefly and then an error advising -
Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software .....
and then I was prompted to attempt to launch startup repair or start windows normally.
I allowed 'startup repair' to run and after some time it displayed that windows could not automatically be repaired.
I have 'googled' this problem and tried everything I have read but without success.
I tried using Q-Flash to reflash using the copy of the original bios I have but it will not allow previous versions to be used.

I thought that I might be able to get the motherboard to use the 'other' bios (dual bios) but could not find anything in bios setup. I found something on the web to try and force the normal bios to get a checksum error so that on startup the backup bios would over write the normal bios but could not get this to work.

I tried rebooting with the Windows 7 installation disk and doing a windows repair but that also did not work.

Do I have to reformat my drive and install windows and everything else again? Hopefully not.

[macexperts]

Re: Upgraded BIOS now Windows 7 will not startup - urgent

sounds like something in your BIOS reverted to stock config when you tried to boot - windows saw a 'hardware' change but apparently your bios is pointing to your boot drive properly
that does sound very odd really
i can't think of anything offhand in BIOS that would change that much that would let you get that far into boot
it sounds like windows was also booting properly but saw a hardware change
does it go back to the same screen when you startup the system now and did you click 'start windows normally' to see what it would do? if you didn't try that and it might just start fine and even Win7 should be able to handle the 'hardware changes'

if not
did you make a recovery CD/DVD in windows? you can boot off that with the DVD and see if it can handle the startup repair for you better than the other one on the drive
even so it doesn't sound like a startup issue - it might have crashed on that first loop but already trying to start windows and that prompted the notice to try startup repair- did you see anything say 'windows didn't startup normally'?