Windows 7 refuses to boot up

[Silvara]

Hi, I was directed to these forums from dearwandy.com so hopefully someone can help me with my windows 7 problem on here!

I had a system failure the other week (a crash dump memory hardware failure type thing) and ever since windows 7 (32 bit) has felt sluggish. I decided to run a full system scan to check for errors, restarted my computer so it would run and ever since it has been stuck in a loop - if I let it run the system check then when it finishes and restarts it says system clean and then freezes. Also if I press a key to prevent the system scan from running then it also freezes. I also tried running my windows disk to see if I can repair the system and that starts loading, but as soon as the starting windows sign appears and a cursor appears then that also freezes.

I also tried F8 when the computer loads but repair computer doesn't seem to do anything, and safe mode hangs at \windows\system32\drivers\class pnp.sys
I did leave load in last known good configuration (or whatever it is called) and after about 20 min it did load windows but would freeze as soon as I tried any maintance.

If I need to reinstall windows then how would I go about it? It now loads the windows disk up to the language select, but repair or install both seem to do nothing again (I will leave it running for as long as possible to see if it starts after 20min or more like the other time)

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated as I have no idea how to proceed!

 

[Johnathan Lyman]

Failing RAM sounds like a good place to start here.

Head to Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool and download MemTest86+. Run that program for roughly 5-10 passes. This tool is going to check your RAM to see if there are any bad pieces in it.

If it passes, try to load in Safe Mode with a command prompt and run "chkdsk /r". This will scan the entire surface of your hard drive for errors that may or may not be fixable.

These are the first two areas I would check and in your case the two areas that are most likely to be causing issues.

If both come back clean, please let us know and we can proceed from there.

Thanks!

 

[Silvara]

thanks for that - I am at work, but will try that as soon as I get home and let you know what it says

 

[theog]

Check with a hard drive diagnostic tools.
Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.

 

[Silvara]

The memory diagnostics came up with no problems, and the chkdsk found a few bad sectors and fixed them. Following this I could get into windows (although it was still taking more than 5-10min to load up) so I ran repair from the windows disk, but it never found anything. In the end I got fed up and decided to re-install windows and now it seems fine - so maybe there was a corrupted file somewhere in startup which the repiar functions didn't locate?
Hopefully it's now all fixed though, and many thanks for the advice guys!

 

[theog]

You are welcome.