Win 7 update caused error, how to boot Advent laptop in safe mode?

well with the sfc /scannow i guess i could have been
but then surely it would have just completed and been happy?

chkdsk /f /r (from command line) was hanging after about 30 minutes
it was doing a lot of disk activity for first 30 mins, as you might expect, then nothing. No errors, no it's ok, Just nothing at all even if left another 30 mins

yes i guess it's possible i didn't need to change the windows partition to boot, but i look at my laptop partitions, and the recovery wasn't boot, and windows was, so logically i thought it can't hurt to have them the same.

tonyuk123 said:

Eventually use Ubuntu install disk to run full system from cd
Checked partitions, for some reason recovery partition had become boot drive ! so i put that back to windows partition. This changed things, but still no boot
Used a linux tool to scan and fix NTFS drive, which only found some corrupt parts withing one user profile, and that was in a camera picture folder.
Really not sure why that would stop windows booting but ho hum !
Anyway all up and running now thanks to Linux !
Thanks for your help, at least i learnt how to force a safe mode and get extra options from the boot if i need to

So this wasn't a hardware problem? I'm trying to get my friend's laptop to boot up with exactly the same errors you were getting. At least this has given me some hope of fixing it. I've never used Ubuntu poor Linux tools but I'll have a look.

Thanks

That meant to say 'I've never used Ubuntu or Linux tools' not 'poor Linux tools'!