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#1
Laptop Went to Sleep and Now Windows Won't Load Anymore
I have an older laptop that I really like. It has Win7 Ultimate with all the latest updates and upgrades from MS on it. There's even a back-up archive on it that gets saved every Sunday.
The laptop will usually display a slide show whenever there's inactivity. But occasionally, the screen will go dark and the machine won't come out of this state. It's still on, the lights are lit and the fan's running, so it's not really "asleep" I suppose. But when this happens, I can't get it to come around. So I have to shut down the machine, then fire it back up again. And when I do, I always get the screen asking me if I want to continue or to scan the machine for errors. I always just tell it to boot and everything is always fine. But not this last time. It proceeds to the 4-color Windws splash screen and that's as far is it gets. The hard drive light is solidly lit for the first several seconds, then it flickers, and goes out. And that's it.
This last time, I told myself that maybe after all the stuff I've tried to get it to wake back up it might just need a really long time to put itself back together again and then it'll finish booting. Well, it's been over an hour now, and still no joy.
This happened yesterday. So after I couldn't get it to load, I selected the Repair option and eventually decided to use a Restore Point. So I selected a recent one and let it do its thing. After a few minutes, the machine generated a popup that claimed the Restore Point had been set and the machine was good to go. So I restarted it, but it didn't make any difference. I tried this a few different times on different restore points. Didn't make a difference.
Next I pulled out my Win7 disk. Not knowing what else to do, I figured I'd just go ahead and re-install Windows. But nooooo, it wouldn't let me do that, either. The install routine was claiming that there was (were?) missing file(s) and it couldn't continue. So then I just decided I'd suck it up and do a clean install -- deleting all my installations. But nope, it wouldn't let me do that either! Again an error message about missing files, as I recall.
So at this point I don't know what else to do, short of buying a copy of Win10 and hope for the best. For all I know, Win10 might not even install.
So I guess I'm wondering -- is there any sort of Super Windows Fix Disk available that I can burn a copy of, or maybe a truly useful utility I can download that will unstick my machine?
As always, your help is greatly appreciated.