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#1
Can't boot to Windows, having some major issues.
Hello and thanks for taking the time to read this. :) I'll preface this post by saying that I'm not a hardware guru and I've been very bad in not writing down every single thing that I could regarding these errors.
That being said, here is my problem. About a week ago I started getting errors, presumably caused by Google Chrome (not crippling errors and easily taken care of by deleting the browser entirely) and then from Catalyst ATI (also taken care of by uninstall/reinstall). After a few days my PC became sluggish, and here's where I made the mistake. I restarted my PC hoping to restore order....but what I got was errors. Chkdsk ran, found errors (lots of orphaned files, a few bad sectors, etc) and I was promptly booted back into windows.
Now, my desktop manager starts crashing along with Windows Explorer and my PC locks up. Unable to do anything I use the old fashioned restart (smash the Power button). Once again, Chkdsk finds a fixes errors, boots me to Windows and then the freeze hits. This happens 3 or 4 more times with a few Startup Repairs in between.
Today, no Chkdsk, no windows and startup repair fails because "StartupRepairOffline". There are just a bunch of 0's and unknowns in the dialog box. Tried to do a fresh reinstall from my Vista recovery cd's and it hangs at "Loading Files" on the copy screen. Running repair tools from Win 7 Home Premium 64bit upgrade disk gets me errors such as "System Restore failed. Cannot find path" or something similar, Startup repair gives the "StartupRepairOffline" (the details of which tell me that my HDD is not responding), Memory Diagnostics cannot be launched etc.
CMD Prompt works, so I tried sfc / scannow but it says that I have a Repair pending which requires a reboot. After searching on the net for a while I found a CMD line to clear the pending.xml doc, but it does not exist on my system.
Reboot huh? Tried starting in Safe Mode so I could do a real restart, but the boot hangs on a file called Classpnp.sys. Manual shutdown and restart after this boots me to a screen that tries to boot from a CD.
Where do I go from here? Im too stubborn to accept the fact that my HDD might be fried, but is it really that simple of a case? If that does end up being the case, is there any way I can use my Vista 32 recovery disks and my Win 7 64 Home Premium disk to install windows on a new HDD or do I have to buy a full version of Win 7? Any suggestions would be deeply appreciated and I apologize if this thread is too long considering the lack of information.
Steve