Windows 7 won’t boot up, Safe Mode hangs (typically at CLASSPNP.SYS), the System Recovery can’t fix (Bad Patch and AutoFailover errors) and there are no recovery points to revert back to. Sound familiar? There’s a working solution!Don’t reformat right away and reinstall — try this first:

From either the Windows 7 DVD or using the Recovery Environment (choose the link to see other options to repair the problem, and a selection of buttons appears), choose the command prompt.

Typically, your C: drive is your main Windows System partition. Just to be sure, check on the drive letter. In the command prompt, type “diskpart” and then, once you have a prompt (may take some time), type “list vol” to list the volumes on your machine. If you only see your optical drive, reboot, and retry. You should see partitions listed. Once you’ve found your Windows 7 partition letter, note it down, and type “exit“.

Now, switch to the System32 directory on the Windows partition (replace C with your drive letter should yours be different) by typing “cd /d c:\windows\system32”

And now the revertion and rollback of pending actions and patches causing the problem: “dism /image:c:\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions” to use the Deployment Image Servicing and Management Tool.

It may take a while. On restart, you should be up and running. Other possible problems include a loose harddrive cable and badly seated or faulty RAM. If you’ve ruled all that out, the above should sort you out!

Worked for me! But you knew that already…