Windows Hangs when booting

[pettym]

Hey All, I've tried to search my problem but I couldn't find anything like what I am seeing:

WIN 7 64bit. 8 gig ram. Gateway - thats all the info I have with me
I woke up the other day to see "Loading Windows" on my screen. I didn't shut down or reset the night before, I just locked it and went to bed. I saw that it wasn't doing anything so I powered down and tried a reboot. It asks me to go into the safe mode/repair windows mode (I forget the term and I'm at work now). When I do that, it says loading windows files with the gray loading bar. The bar fully completes into white but does not move on from there.

When I try to boot normally (not in repair mode) it just hangs at the loading windows screen.

I don't have a hard copy of Win7 as I used the educational discount to download it and since it installed fine, it didn't cross my mind to burn a backup disk (dumb, i know)...

Thoughts?

 

[Jonathan_King]

That almost reminds me of a hard drive problem.

Before testing that, try booting from your Windows DVD or repair disc and try a startup repair.

If that doesn't work, download one of these tools and test your drive: Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.