Infinite repair loop, I think I have tried everything.

Dear all,

Let me explain my problem to you in the hope there is a genius out there with a solution I have not tried which will fix my laptop. Im running Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit on a Packard Bell laptop (bought a few weeks ago). Please ask if you need more details. There is a fair bit of explaining in here...

It all started when one day when I power up my laptop to find a 'A Disk Read Error has Occured, press CTRL+ALT+Del to restart'
Ok, wasnt expecting that but I know a few tricks up my sleeve. So I download a win7 recovery disk on my netbook, burn it and put it in my laptop. I boot from disk but find that when it comes to select an operating system, there is nothing there.
In any case I skip that and over the next few days go through this (I may not get the order correct because I have done things multiple times over a few days):-

Run Startup Repair which did not respond for 24hrs (repeated again)
Run FixMBR, Fixboot & RebuildBCD, successful but dont fix (RebuildBCD reports 0 windows installations)
Try to run CHKDSK but get a read only problem
Repair Registry using the whole 'mybackup, hive files etc.' thing
Use cmd to find info on the HDD
Enter HDD using 'locate drivers' and make backups of important data
Rerun CHKDSK, this time specifying D drive (main partition). This hangs at 11% on stage 4
Run Startup repair a few more times, nothing.
sfc /scannow tells me I have a repair pending and have to restart every time i try to use it. Even straight after a restart.

By this stage Im preparing to give up when after leaving Startup Repair on over night I find that the "Disk read error" has gone! (I dont know which of the above fix attempts was the culprit)

However! It was replaced with a "Missing OS" error. After restarted this error has now been replaced with an infinite repair loop. On the plus side, the recovery disk now recognizes my OS in the select OS window (as Windows 7 (recovered)?) and the recovery options can be run without using the dvd. I have run Startup Repair a few times, after the first couple of different error reports and fixes it now always comes up with a corrupted registry as the root problem, after running through all the checks 3 times. So I redid the manual registry repair, to no avail. I then try and boot into Safe Mode which just hangs at the windows loading screen, as does 'Last know good configuration'. Do pretty much all the beforementioned fixes again. RebuildBCD still reports 0 installation of windows even though it now seems to have come back in a partial way. Sfc scannow still doesnt work. I try system restore but I dont have a restore point.

Now I am trying CHKDSK again but its been sitting at 11% again for a little while now, although now at 10052 out of 264688 instead of 10054 out of whatever it was before.

I know I have not made the most clear of posts here but I have done lots of different checks and such over the past few days and its hard to remember exactly what the details were. If you would like to know more about any of the individual checks/fixes I have made I will try my best to remember.

Anyway, I know I could wipe the HDD and reinstall Windows but I would really like to fix the problem without doing that if possible, because otherwise I will feel defeated.

So if anyone has any more suggestions I will try it out and see if it works. And if it works or even if it doesnt I will really appreciate it.

Thanks for the reply JMH. My OS has gone missing again and now startup repair reports 'Bad Hard Disk' error. I guess its a major problem. Wont let me install windows because the HDD is bad.

Oh well, back to the shop it goes.

Would just like to thank everyone on this site for the very useful guides and info.

If your computer is under Warranty then a duty of care applies.
Please let us know how you go.
Good luck!:)

So things did not go as smoothly as I had hoped.

I took it back to the shop, but the problem is I dont speak the language here so it was pretty difficult trying to explain things. He looked at the error message and told me to come back with a recovery disk (because the computer repair shop didnt have one? yeah...). He said my windows is missing and the warranty does not cover software problems. But I will go back tomorrow with the disc and hopefully things will work out.

However, in the chance that it does not work out, do you reckon formatting the disk will allow me to install windows again? I assumed because of the problems and errors that the hdd is broken, but if formatted could it run fine again? I know nobody could know for sure without seeing it personally, but I would like to know if there is a chance of saving the hdd. I did not format it before going to the the shop because that would definitely ruin my warranty.

Link for you to peruse -

Startup Repair Infinite Loop Recovery