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Adam Jewell

8 Years Ago

Getting Windows 7 To Boot?

Does anyone have any solutions or programs they use to get Win7 to boot up when it's not cooperating?

I don't have the Windows disks and don't have anyway to get them but could download something if anyone has had success with something.

The battery ran out of power, the computer shut down and now it won't boot.

None of the safe mode stuff seems to work or rolling it back to the last working configuration cause it can't identify a point to roll back to.

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TL Mair

8 Years Ago

One of mine wouldn't if I had a card in one of the card reader slots, had another one that didn't like external hard drives.
I have no idea if that helps but thought I'd throw it out there, good luck.
TL Mair
http://tlmair.com

 

Greg Norrell

8 Years Ago

Are there no restore points to use? Not sure where you're at, but you're welcome here to sort it out if needed.

 

Bob Galka

8 Years Ago

I assume that you have been using an up to date anti-virus program???

Now when you say it won't boot up.. tell us exactly what happens... the unit is unplugged.. you plug it in... turn on your monitor... press the power button on the computer..

what exactly happens at this point.... tell us everything.. sights... smells.. sounds.. ;O)

 

Adam Jewell

8 Years Ago

Its an Asus laptop. It doesn't like external hard drives so I've taken out all those and the SD chip.

Every time Windows would install an update it would choke and I'd have to roll it back and do it again so I disabled that a few weeks ago.

When I power it in now with no externals plugged in, it's just a black screen that says

"Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key"

Sometimes it goes to the "Windows Error Recovery" screen where you can choose to run startup repair or start windows normally.

The startup repair runs and can't fix the problem.

I got chkdsk to run successfully once and that didn't solve the problem.

I've tried the various safe mode options to start it when going to the F8 menu on startup and those don't solve anything.

I'm wondering if something like this might do the trick

http://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/

Or if Microsoft might have some sort of downloadable piece of software so it might be able to boot from a USB drive.

When startup repair fails the details include

ProblemEventName StartupRepairOffline

Some numbers as problem signatures 1-4

ProblemSignature5 AutoFailover

ProblemSignature07 NoRootCause

Thanks Greg! I'm up in East Glacier heading North as soon as the weather clears.

Unfortunately Amazon prime seems to take more like 5 days to ship a new one up here instead of just two.

 

Adam Jewell

8 Years Ago

In system restore it says no points have been created on your computer systems drive. To create a restore point open System Protection.

Click on that and it says

Your computer is running in a limited diagnostic state. If you use system restore in this limited state you cannot undo the restore operation.


Then it provides no way to move forward to try that.

 

Adam Jewell

8 Years Ago

So now it's set to run the extended "Windows memory Diagnostics Tool" which freezes at 21% and might take 7 hours so I'll let that run and sleep on it

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/memory-diagnostic-problem/a5f54404-aac9-4f9a-a475-98f2a7a13770

 

Melissa Bittinger

8 Years Ago

bumping all threads to hide spam posts...can't do it! there's tooo many!!

 

SharaLee Art

8 Years Ago

Bump

 

Adam Jewell

8 Years Ago

Bump

 

Adam Jewell

8 Years Ago

Bump

 

Floyd Snyder

8 Years Ago

bump

 

Kathleen Bishop

8 Years Ago

Adam, please let us know what the solution is (other than a new laptop).

 

Floyd Snyder

8 Years Ago

Something not clear. If it is not booting, how can it say no points have been created?

You can go to eBay and buy a new boot copy of Windows 7 for about $18.

 

Bob Galka

8 Years Ago

Of course it can be many things, but seems like your hard drive is damaged. The laptop first loads software into memory to start the operating system. the only device you have is a hard drive. When the OA boot software looks for your operating system it either cannot see your harddrive.. or it does, but cannot see your operating system on it due to either the harddrive being physically damaged, or the area on the hard drive where the operating system is stored is corrupted, possibly by malware... you did not say if you had anti-virus / anti-malware software running on your computer.

 

Adam Jewell

8 Years Ago

The extensive memory check/scan ran overnight and found nothing. It's had windows defender running on it. Norton and Mcaffee cause more problems than they might have solved so I go rid of those. Used avg for a while too but that seemed to cause issues as well.

@Floyd

It will get to startup repair and I can use F8 before the Windows logo shows up on startup but that's as far as it goes. It doesn't get to the point of actually being able to do anything with it like open a photo editor or web page.

It's had issues like this before after an auto upgrade and when it is shut down with an external hd attached but always worked fine after a couple restarts.

 

Bob Galka

8 Years Ago

well if you weren't using an internet condom then you are infected... time to take to geek patrol, or what ever their name is.

you are not going to do this by yourself.

 

Greg Norrell

8 Years Ago

It sounds to me perhaps there's a problem with the BIOS. I'm not sure if you can access the BIOS and run a check.

 

Adam Jewell

8 Years Ago

I think I'll figure it out at some point. I won't go near the geek squad. Sure, we'll get you back up and running in no time and your computer will be good as new!

Reformat Hard Drive

Say farewell to your data!

While it could certainly be some virus I think something just went out of whack when the battery was exhausted while it was running psp, Firefox and stitching big panos all at once.

There will probably be a simple fix for this just as when a hard drive went corrupt, I took it to computer places they said the data was lost or wanted a fortune to do more analysis.

In the end the guy that worked on it said out of about 1tb only 300 megs were on it. A little research turned up a program that pulled every last file off it it. There is probably something out there like that for this situation.

As long a it's not a mechanical failure I think there is almost always a way to fix it unless there is some really nasty virus actively destroying the disc.

A windows 7 disc might very well do the trick but unfortunately I can't get one of those quickly up here.

Bios sounds quite likely, just have to figure out how to get in there and fix it.

 

Greg Norrell

8 Years Ago

The fact that you've had trouble when booting with an external drive connected is one indicator something is wrong with the BIOS. Some machines will have a backup BIOS so that a corrupted version can be corrected. You might search Asus website for info on getting into the BIOS, if you can't find it on your own.

 

Adam Jewell

8 Years Ago

This looks promising, so hopefully it will work!

https://neosmart.net/EasyRE/

 

Kathleen Bishop

8 Years Ago

I run an Asus also and always unplug the external drives after I shut down then connect them again after I boot up and it's done doing it's thing. Just habit. Well, this one time I forgot to unplug them after I shut down and left them plugged in when I tried to boot up the next day. It wouldn't boot. Acted like it was fried. Turned the thing off, unplugged the drives, tried starting it again and it booted up just fine. I never made THAT mistake again.

 

Adam Jewell

8 Years Ago

Something about ASUS and external hard drives don't get a long too well. Often since I'm stitching big panos and they can take a long time, I just put the computer to sleep with the external hard drive still attached so it just pauses the stitching and isn't necessary to start over. As soon as the slumber is over it picks up right where it left off.

The Windows 7 Version of that program was successfully put on a CF chip via USB on an old Toshiba Netbook and then plugged into the ASUS. It did its thing. I restarted Windows and twice it went to check the disks for errors (black screen) or something like that. On the next restart I did the F8 thing and successfully got it into safe mode.

Now its' copying all the photo files on the second partition to an external. It looks like its not a hard drive failure (mechanical) but something in the BIOS or something is out of whack. I think it could be a space issue on the C; Partition cause when the battery died and it shut down there was only about 2 GIGs of free space showing on the C: Drive.

Once the files are off of it, I'll play around with that program and more and see if it will actually get the computer working again.

They supposedly give you a refund if it won't fix the computer so will try their tech support if I can't get it to fix the computer and then get a refund and be back to square one if it won't work.

 

This discussion is closed.