windows wont boot up

butcherknife · 05 Sep 2010

ok so i have a dell inspiron 1501, with windows 7 and it just wont boot up. i turn it on and it takes about 20seconds to load up
the DELL welcome screen with the bios version. the red loading bar just sits there for almost 30 seconds until it finishes, when it does the screen just goes plain black with the flashing dash thing. it just stays that way forever. also, the activity green light is steady on, does not even blink, as if it was under so much activity.

i tried booting from the recovery disk so i could try tto repair any start up problems i dont make it past the "windows loading" thing, it just freezes right there again.

same when i tried booting from the windows 7 dvd to do a clean install, i make it to the "windows loading" thing with the four colors and it freezes up again. and again, with the green light steady on.
any help will be greatly appreciated, thanks. adrian.

richc46 · 05 Sep 2010

If you want to do a clean install, adjust the bios to boot from the DVD.
This is the same as Seven
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/20...ty-change.html

butcherknife · 05 Sep 2010

i did. i can see the gray windows loading files bar but after that i get another "loading windows" bar and it freezes right there again.

gregrocker · 05 Sep 2010

Test your memory by booting memtest86 CD, run for 5-6 passes or overnight to really stress test it.

Test your HD using maker's full diag/repair CD scan: Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.

butcherknife · 05 Sep 2010

what will memtest do for me?

gregrocker · 05 Sep 2010

It will test your RAM. It sounds like you have hardware problems, so these are the two things which Users can test most easily.

If you have bad RAM, isolate which stick is causing the errors and replace it.

If it is the HD, sometimes the maker's repair scan can fix the HD to return it to normal service, or you will know for sure it is the problem.

If the hardware is clear then I would wipe the HD to reinstall Win7. Free Partition Wizard bootable CD will autostart to wipe your HD with zeroes to overwrite any possibly infected code. Then the Win7 DVD should autostart, too, to reinstall. Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD option 3

If you have a factory Recovery partition, you can also run it from boot: http://support.dell.com/support/topi...7D4&doclang=en

If you can't boot the DVD to copy out your files using this method Copy & Paste - in Windows Recovery Console then use Paragon Rescue Disk which should autostart to rescue your files: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/rk-express/

I uploaded the best image burner. Use 4x speed - it never fails:

Lomai · 05 Sep 2010

butcherknife said:

what will memtest do for me?

- What is memtest86+, what do I use it for?

Memtest86+ is a utility designed to test whether your memory is in working
order. It repeatedly writes an enormous amount of different patterns to all
memory locations and reads them back again and verifies whether the result
of the read is the same as what was written to memory.

There can be a multitude of reasons for running memtest, but foremost of all
is of course to test whether your memory modules might be bad. Whenever you
suspect your modules to be bad because of system crashes, lockups or reboots
it would be nice to know whether the modules are in working order.
Memtest86+ is a utility which tries to answer that question for you.

Hope this answers your query - more here

butcherknife · 05 Sep 2010

thanks a lot, i will try that and post in any results (:

Carl Lawrence · 05 Sep 2010

You will download iso and burn it to a blank cd-rom. You have to use a program that will make it bootable like Deepburner.

butcherknife · 06 Sep 2010

ok so i went and downloaded the seatools iso from the the seagate website, burned it to a cd and booted from it. i did a long scan and it found about 90 bad sectors, it gave me the option to repair them but they all failed to repair, i repeated the process about 3 times but they all failed to repair anything.

i noticed in the advance features tab, there is a "erase track zero" "time erase" full erase" option. will any of these bring the HDD back to life?

is there ANY way to repair those bad sectors? an alternative one?
also, is there a way to recover some of the data from the faulty disk?