Win 7 not booting properly

FosterK · 15 Mar 2011 at 17:56

So, I came back to my PC the other night after popping into the kitchen and it had thoroughly locked up. Mouse was moving, but absolutely nothing was responding. So I did what anyone else would do in that situation, and powered down. Gave it a few minutes, then booted it up again.

Now, when it boots up, it loads windows and gives me a choice: Load Win7 normally, or start windows system repair.

Loading win7 normally, it shows the glowing windows icon as it loads, then the screen goes black, and it reboots, taking me to the same choice.

Selecting the windows system repair tool however, loads up a nice pretty blue wallpaper, and gives me a perpetually spinning circle for a cursor - ie, doesn't do a great deal in the long run.

So, I whacked out my Win7 install CD hoping to fix whatever was up there. Boot off that, and it hangs on 'Loading Windows Setup'. So no joy there.

Also thought I'd give Memtest86 a bash, see if there's anything up. Had no errors whatsoever. Following that, I thought I'd try Dell's own built in diagnostic tool. No errors there either.

Currently, I'm on an ubuntu live DVD - all my files are intact, hard drives are working and I can access everything.

It's a Dell XPS 430 with:
Intel Q8300
4GB RAM
ATI HD4800
Boot HDD is something from Dell, 1TB, with three partitions:
-OS, 984GB NTFS
-DellUtility, 82MB FAT
-Recovery, 16GB NTFS

WD Caviar 250GB HDD for media.

I've already found some advice about disconnecting non-essential peripherals such as FDD and front USB ports/card reader etc. But that's not done a great deal.

Also, being on an ubuntu live DVD, and being able to access the files on my boot disk, is there anywhere I should look, anything I can do to diagnose or even fix my problem from within ubuntu?

Basically, if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears!

Cheers

Update: I've also run a bucketload of tests from Ultimate Boot CD - nothing seems to be wrong, again.

trackrat · 15 Mar 2011 at 20:16

As you have an install disk, try a Window 7 reair install.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html

FosterK · 15 Mar 2011 at 20:19

Thanks for the suggestion, but seeing as the first step is:

1. Start Windows 7, and log on to an administrator account.

and I can't start windows 7, no can do unfortunately!

UnworthyBean · 15 Mar 2011 at 21:40

FosterK said:
So, I whacked out my Win7 install CD hoping to fix whatever was up there. Boot off that, and it hangs on 'Loading Windows Setup'. So no joy there.

It even hangs directly from the CD? Bit of an odd one but that points more towards hardware over software issues.

FosterK · 15 Mar 2011 at 22:44

I've ended up unplugging the TB hard drive for the time being, I'm pretty sure that's the issue. With that out, the windows installation CD worked instantly.

As such, I've just installed windows on the 250GB HDD, after moving all files over to the TB hard drive in ubuntu, where, curiously, everything seems fine with said hard drive...

The new install worked fine, dead quick. Turned it off to plug the TB HDD back in, and then the new install was very, very slow to boot, and looking at anything to do with the TB hard drive caused Explorer to lock up. Can't even look at it properly in device manager.

Think I'll be having to buy a new TB HDD, taking the 250GB one out, and transferring over the ~800GB of stuff to the new one using ubuntu. That said, before that I'm gonna try and play about with the likes of partitionmagic. For some reason, in explorer, my computer shows that there are two partitions of 'local disk' (the TB HDD), though neither of them are accessible or even display sizes. Thinking there may be a broken partition table or something somewhere, that diagnostics didn't show up for some reason.