Laptop failing to boot Windows 7

[yugas42]

Hey guys, just got home from school and turned on my laptop to check my email, to my surprise after about 15 minutes of use it shut off with no prompts or warnings (sudden shutdown, no blue screen, no Windows shutdown process) and now it will not boot into Windows at all. After about 60 seconds on the 'Starting Windows' screen it will blue screen for a fraction of a second, then return to the Windows Boot Manager. The Windows Recovery won't start either. This computer is set up to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux, the later of the two is what i'm using to type this right now, there's no problem with Linux, which makes me think it isn't hardware related, although it could be. I also doubt the fact that it would be a virus as I regularly use Malwarebytes and Avast, not to mention knowing my way around the internet well enough to generally be safe. Does anyone know what could be causing this? I'm at a loss after trying to fix it for about the last hour.

 

[aford10]

Can you boot into safe mode?

 

[yugas42]

Just tried it, same result as a normal boot, very fast blue screen then back to the Windows Boot Manager where it lists both Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

 

[aford10]

If you have the win7 disc, put that in, and do the startup repair.

 

[Kindredsouls]

Try this:

Get to the menu just like when you tried loading into Safe Mode. Press F8. When the menu loads select "Disable automatic restart on system failure". Then when your computer starts up and blue screens you will be able to record the error message and begin troubleshooting.

Hope this helps and I wish you luck!

 

[yugas42]

If you have the win7 disc, put that in, and do the startup repair.

I do have a matching Windows 7 Home Premium disk, but the computer came pre-installed with Win7, the disk I have is an upgrade package, are the disks the same?

 

[aford10]

It should work fine as long as it's home premium installed on the laptop.

 

[yugas42]

Thanks, going to try that now. I'm fairly sure I know what it is though. I just got a call from "Microsoft Support" asking to help with my computer, knowing that Microsoft never calls you, i'm suspicious that there was some Malware on my computer somewhere, they disabled it and then wanted to scam me. Pretty serious virus if it can do that, but I wouldn't doubt it.

 

[yugas42]

Accidental double post, ignore this.

 

[aford10]

In that case, if you get up and running, you may want to run through the malware guide in my signature.

 

[apache_lives]

TEST YOUR HARDWARE

Dont know how many times i have to say this

Theres a reason for Windows failing to boot and its a 70% chance its hardware

 

[yugas42]

Hard Drive seems to be a total loss on this computer. I can run Linux fine but my C: / cannot be accessed at all, even from Linux. It won't run the Win7 disk at all and i've even launched the setup on the disk from Linux and it tells me it can't find room for temp files, which tells me it can't read the drive at all. Only solution I can see at this point is to replace the hard drive.

 

[aford10]

Does the BIOS see the hard drive still?

 

[yugas42]

Yes it does, shows Windows Boot Manager and Ubuntu both in the boot device list.

 

[aford10]

Did you get an error when trying to boot off the win7 disc?

 

[yugas42]

It just wouldn't load at all. Gave me a mouse pointer in the middle of a black screen, stayed that way for 20 minutes.

 

[yugas42]

Idk what's with these double posts :l

 

[aford10]

I don't know what kind of tools you have available to you, but I would pull the hard drive, and do some error checking on it as a slave drive.

 

[yugas42]

Well long story short I guess I got lucky and it let me into the Asus recovery program, I totally wiped the hard drive and reimaged it. Looking at a fresh install of Win7 right now, problem solved somehow, but starting all over again. Thanks for the help everyone.

 

[aford10]

Thanks for the update.