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#1
From Startup Repair endless loop to no boot at all
Hi, everyone. First post in this forum. I appreciate any advice you can offer me. Here's the story: My HP laptop (about 5-years old, Windows 7 Home 64 bit), which showed no signs of performance problems beyond what you'd expect for a five-year old machine, suddenly shut off. Not a proper shutdown sequence. Just BANG -- off. As if suddenly all power was yanked.
Then it automatically started booting again, but it could not complete the boot. It got about as far as the Windows splash and then booted again. This time, it presented the option of doing a Startup Repair. (This screen here.) Running Startup Repair, it could get as far as Loading Files or, once or twice, even as far as the actual Windows Startup Repair tool, but it never completed a repair and kept rebooting in an endless Startup Repair loop.
Now, almost all of the time, it doesn't boot anything at all. Not even BIOS. When I hit the power button, the fans run (and possibly the HD spins? hard to tell), but nothing else happens. Every once in a while, it can boot a little bit, and I can get into the BIOS settings, but those times are becoming fewer and fewer. It hasn't booted anything at all since mid-yesterday.
At first I assumed the boot files somehow became corrupted, but the initial weird shutoff and the recent inability to do anything at all except spin fans is making me wonder if this isn't a hardware problem. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.