I have been using Win7 Ultimate for three months but today I booted it up with a second disk to perform a back-up. The second disk was not visible and on Partition Manger I noticed it had no drive letter so I decided to make it 'E'. Partition manager went through its normal drive letter change routine but when it re-booted I could not get beyond the welcome screen. ie I couldn't get to my desktop. Even more worryingly, when I selected an 'Admin user' the screen tried to load my desktop settings then reverted to a blue scree with the following message in the bottom RH carner: "Windows 7. Build 7600 This copy of windows is not genuine!" I could do nothing with the blank screen so had to switch off. My Win7 Ultimate was given to me by a MS employee friend and has worked and updated with no problem. It has never left my posesion and therefore must be genuine. Do I have any alternative to carrying out a complete new insrtallation from my installation disk? Regards - kayecy

I hoped that someone more knowledgeable would weigh in, but as no one has yet... Have you disconnected the new drive? If not, do it. Then, can you boot the machine? If so, open the System control panel. (Quick way: windows key+ pause/break key.) Look at the lower entries in the main pane. What's your activation status? If it's not activated, can you activate online? You may have to activate by phone. (You can force that by running the command line utility "slui 4" without the quotes.) If none of that works, the more risky thing to try would be a repair installation. That's basically an upgrade-in-place of Win7 over itself. It should preserve all settings and installed applications, but there are no guarantees. (It would have been nice if that backup you tried had worked.) The clean re-install is an option, but of last resort. Good luck.