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#1
Win7 boots to blank screen (no login box), startup repair not working
We have a Windows 7 computer, fairly new Acer Inspire laptop. Recently, when it had turned itself off for power reasons, when we entered the login it first said 'not found' and then dropped to a screen that looks like the login background but without the login box. Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesn't work, you have to force hard boot. On rebooting, it recognizes that startup failed and offers an attempt to repair. I ran this about 40 times, I think it's clear that isn't fixing it. It boots to that plain screen, so it starts windows, but then just sits there.
I'm told the Windows 7 disk has a more detailed startup repair option that might allow us to solve this without losing a lot of critical data on the hard drive. However we cannot find the dang thing, we had a whole stack of info/disks/etc. I thought was in the box it came in, but when we got it down from the closet, box was empty, and we can't find any trace of any of the original materials. I don't know what to do. Is there some way just to get that repair-startup utility without having to purchase a whole new windows 7 disk? We are afraid to send it for warranty repair to Acer because the default 'repair' appears to be reverting back to default settings which would wipe out all our data.
Do you have any suggestions?
Many thanks,
PJ