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#1
Laptop stuck in BSOD boot loop; StartupRepair, other tools not helpful
I was handed a Windows 7 laptop from a friend last Friday and I've been going over it since that time. It's a Lenovo SL410 with 4 GB RAM running Windows 7 Pro 64 bits. This is the original factory installation and the laptop is 2 years old. Motherboard was replaced about 18 months ago. It has a Hitachi 320 GB hard drive. I ran a Seatools long test over the hard drive and it passed all tests. I ran 12 passes of memtest86 on the RAM with 0 errors. Near as I can tell, that hardware is good.
Yet somehow, this laptop corrupted itself, and now it's stuck in a BSOD/Reboot loop. Booting into safe mode also generates a BSOD. Last known good also crashes. As far as I know, there were no significant events leading up to this failure - it just happened last Thursday night.
Booting into the Windows recovery environment, I've tried at least 20 Startup Repair operations. They generally report "Startup Repair cannot repair this computer automatically." One of the earlier Startup Repair runs reported an error 490, which is apparently a generic unknown error. Less than helpful. I've tried this both from the system hard drive and booting from a Windows 7 Pro OEM DVD.
In a DOS window, I've tried running sfc /scannow /offbootdir=x:\ /offwindir=d:\windows at least twice. That "d" for offwindir is not a typo. The laptop has a Lenovo recovery partition and I think I can click some buttons and put it back to its factory settings - but I really don't want to take that step.
SFC runs for a long time, then reports it found corrupted files but can't fix them. SFC also claims to leave a log file in %windir%\logs\cbs\cbs.log, but this log has no entries from the day I ran sfc.
chkdsk /r runs cleanly and reports no errors.
I've also done at least 3 attempts at system restore to various earlier dates. They all fail and claim to leave the system unchanged.
From a DOS window, I went to d:\windows\system32\config and backed up all the registry hive files and replaced them with files from ..\RegBack. No change in symptoms.
I looked in d:\windows\system32\drivers and only found only a few files dated recently. These are ksecdd.sys, cng.sys, and ksecpkg.sys dated 2/11/2012. Tcpip.sys is dated 9/29/2011 and the rest are earlier than that, most from July 2009.
I tried booting from the Windows 7 DVD and tried an upgrade install. Unfortunately, Windows 7 apparently only allows upgrade installations when booted from the hard drive. And, of course, if I could boot from the hard drive, I wouldn't be going to all this trouble. What happened to the repair/reinstalls we could do with XP? Which genius Microsoft engineer idea was it who decided to get rid of that capability?
Enough ranting - I don't want to wipe and rebuild this laptop. There must be a way to fix it. I refuse to believe those millions of Windows 7 systems in the field are all ticking timebombs.
Oh yes, the BSODs. I scribbled a few of them on a piece of paper:
One from Safe Mode - loading ClassPNP.sys, the system hesitates for a few seconds, then does a BSOD:
Stop 7e, FFFFFFFFC0000005 FFFFFA8005B6D2C5 FFFFF88002566768 FFFFF8802565FD0 (Aw nuts, I think that last one is missing a digit.)
Booting normally -
Page_fault_in_nonpaged_area
Stop 50 FFFFF88037C6000 0000000000000001 FFFFF80002E81381 0000000000000000
Another one:
Stop 7B FFFFF880009a9928 FFFFFFFFC000000D 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
How do I fix this thing?
thanks
- Greg Scott