Win 7 Grinding Halt

[goneforlunch]

The story so far....

Came home from a week abroad. Kids had been looking up game cheats (suspicious). System (HP desktop, 3 years old, upgraded from Vista to Win 7 Pro x32) was running slow and coming to a gradual freeze. Had been working just fine before I left town, and for the last few months since I upgraded.

I get home - system is now at the stage where it will boot to the login screen - I can login but immediately freezes once all the icons have loaded. I can boot in safe mode, manage to run AVG 9.0 scan, no problems found. I try a system restore - no joy - freezes after a while. The problem gets worse. Can no longer boot in safe mode, PC now gives me two options - boot normally or do system repair. Try the latter - it loads files, but then goes to a blank screen and hangs. If I attempt norml boot, I get to the windows 7 logo, but it just stays there for hours.

I do have recovery disks. Tried booting from them (after altering th eBIOS to boot from drive), again loads files,and get the loading bar, no logo this time, but then, again, no further progress.


I can get to the BIOS, F10 Setup and F11 System Recovery (which gives same result as above) - no option for safe mode anymore, just system repair/normal boot options. F8 doesn't get me anywhere.

I'm stumped - any ideas?

 

[ghost]

It could be a hard-drive failure - have you tried running scandisk?
try scandisk /autofix
/autofix - This option will fix any errors it encounters without prompting you first. By default, when you use the /AUTOFIX option, ScanDisk will save any lost clusters it finds as files in the drive`s root directory. If you want ScanDisk to delete lost clusters instead of saving them, include the /NOSAVE option. Using the /AUTOFIX option, ScanDisk will also prompt you for an Undo disk unless you include the /NOSUMMARY option. The /AUTOFIX command can be used in conjunction with the /CHECKONLY and /CUSTOM options.