Solved BSOD before login screen

[dizdar]

When I boot my laptop (Dell Studio 15) which is running Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) I get a BSOD before Windows gets to the login screen.

This all started a week or so ago when my laptop came out of Hibernation mode and was performing very slow. Eventually it locked up (unresponsive to any key presses ... including Ctrl + Alt + Del) ... I waited 20 minutes or so and it never came to life. I did a hard power cycle on it and this is when the problem started.

Now, upon boot it comes up and asks if I want to go into Recover mode. If I boot normally it will come up and BSOD and immediately restart.

If I boot into Recovery mode it will "load files" and then come up to a screen with a background and a responsive cursor. This will sit at this point for hours on end with no more progress.

Since I cannot even boot into Windows I cannot attach any kind of crash dump or anything. I am able to boot into a Live version of Ubuntu so I know most all the parts (memory, HDD, etc) of the laptop are working.

While in Ubuntu I am able to access all parts of the HDD so if it is possible that a log was created at some point I could grab it. But personally I cannot seem to find anything in my limited searching.

I will be running a full RAM check on the laptop tonight to validate that there isn't something going on with it and will post results when I find them. Until then, any additional help would be nice.

Thanks

 

[Jonathan_King]

Hello,

Do run the RAM test: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105647-ram-test-memtest86.html

Boot up the Windows DVD and perform a startup repair. If you don't have a DVD, you can create a repair disc. While in the recovery environment, open a command prompt and enter:

chkdsk c: /r

Also, does Safe Mode work?

 

[dizdar]

RAM test went through without error ....

Safe mode also crashes ....

But while in the boot options I found one which disables auto restart on crash. So I did that ... found out the stop code is 0xED with error of UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUMN.

Did a bit of research and it all says that you need to run chkdsk or rebuild the boot record. So I was going to boot from recovery disk ....

Upon entering repair mode it does as described before with a background image a responsive cursor but just sits there. Is there anything else I can boot into which can fix the HDD?

 

[Jonathan_King]

Is that the recovery disc that came with the system, or a true Windows installation DVD?

Try creating a repair disc: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2083-system-repair-disc-create.html

 

[dizdar]

I was using the disk which came with my laptop .... so now I have downloaded repair disk from the instructions you linked to.

I booted from the newly created disk ... it comes up and asks what keyboard layout I want so I select US and click Next. The dialog goes away then it just sits there .... just like the other disks.

 

[Jonathan_King]

Run a RAM test: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105647-ram-test-memtest86.html

 

[dizdar]

Ran RAM test .... 7 passes 0 errors.

I am burning Hiren's Boot CD right now to see if there is anything on there that could help out. Will post results when I know them.

 

[dizdar]

Sorry for the extreme lag in my response .... while running Hiren's Boot CD I found that there is the ability to run a mini version of Windows XP. From this I was able to run chkdsk ... it ran for about 8 hours fixing all the problems with my disk. I was then able to successfully boot back into my Windows 7 installation with needing to re-install it.

 

[Jonathan_King]

Good for you, thanks for reporting back!