Windows 7 takes hours to boot, or does not boot al all.

Fr Tod Umptious

Hi

A friend of mine gave me his Windows 7 laptop to take a look at because it is taking a long time to boot.

Apparently the bones of a hour to boot.

I tried it myself and gave up after 2 hours

Then I hit F8 on startup and and got the option to boot in Safe Mode

I tried safe Mode and left it overnight, but it still did not boot, all I have is a pointer on a blank screen.

Anyone know if there is anyway I can get to the OS ?

I tried to run the Mini XP that comes with Hirenes Boot Disk but I gave up after an hour as nothing was happening.

Any and all advise is greatly appreciated.

mp22

Try booting from a linux live cd (ubuntu would be my choice)

Fr Tod Umptious

mp22 wrote: »

Try booting from a linux live cd (ubuntu would be my choice)

Yea I have a few of them at home, I'll try that, thanks

But how will it help we with debugging the Windows OS ?

My feeling is that the machine may be full of spyware/junk or that the HDD may be full.

mp22

Fr Tod Umptious wrote: »

Yea I have a few of them at home, I'll try that, thanks

But how will it help we with debugging the Windows OS ?

My feeling is that the machine may be full of spyware/junk or that the HDD may be full.

If the HD is full you will be able to delete/move stuff to make space.Guessing on what you said about booting I would think that the HD is shot, ubuntu will inform you of this when it boots the pc.

Fr Tod Umptious

mp22 wrote: »

If the HD is full you will be able to delete/move stuff to make space.Guessing on what you said about booting I would think that the HD is shot, ubuntu will inform you of this when it boots the pc.

Thanks

I also have the Hieren boot disk which has some HDD tools on it, I'll try and do a drive scan tonight and see what it turns up

Overheal

if it gives you issues on a linux distro its going to tell you its a hardware problem too

Fr Tod Umptious

Hi, back again with this one

I ran a HDD Re-generator tool from Hieren Boots disk,it took about 2 weeks.

The disk had a few (1500 odd) bad sectors, most of which it repaired.

However after all that the Win 7 is still not booting up properly, some times it taken 5 mins, some times it never comes up.

I am currently running Lubuntu Live CD on it and that is working fine.

I ran things like Spy Bot search and destroy and a virus check using Microsoft Security Essentials but they showed up nothing.

Not sure what to try next

Nate--IRL--

Sounds like the Disk is dying - not sure it is worth persisting with that disk.

Nate

eirator

1500 odd bad sectors and you should throw the HDD in the bin!

Last new laptop HDD I put in for someone (500GB) cost 55euro inc delivery from Amazon so its not worth bothering with one full of bad sectors.

Soundman

Can you do a repair installation of the OS? Could be with the disk errors, that the OS itself has become corrupt.

Fr Tod Umptious

Just ran Disk Utilities tool from Ubuntu live CD on it and it is showing "eminent failure"
So new HDD for this one I think, will install Linux for the guy anyway so at least he will have some OS.

Thanks for the ideas and input.

Capt'n Midnight

Fr Tod Umptious wrote: »

The disk had a few (1500 odd) bad sectors, most of which it repaired.

LOL

bad sectors can't be repaired


What happens is that if a program keeps trying a sector then the hard drive itself will try to recover data from bad sectors and rewrite it on spare sectors reserved at manufacture for this purpose.

by the time you start seeing bad sectors it usually means the drive has run out of the spares and is on it's last legs


something like http://partedmagic.com can report SMART status

belcampprisoner

http://forums.beyond.ca/showthread/t-330188.html

Fr Tod Umptious

Thanks for all the replies on this.
The guy got a new HDD for the Laptop.
Now the problem is to get his current data and OS off the old HDD and on to the new one.
The laptop did not come with a recovery CD so I was thinking of using of of the imaging tools that come with Hiren boot disk to image the old one and restore it to the new one.
But the problem is the old one is corrupt and I cannot make an image file from it, or I just give up because it takes days to do so.

I was thinking of the following
1. Put the new HDD in another laptop, leave the corrupt one in it's existing one.
2. Using Hiren boot disk on both network the two laptops.
3. Copy or clone one HDD to the other using one of the tools in Hiren

Does anyone know if this is possible ?
Is it straightforward to network the two laptops using Hiren boot disk and a cross cable ?
I'm familiar with Linux so I am not afraid to try it.
Or is it a case that because the origional HDD is corrupt then I can never clone or image it and will have to find a new Win 7 insatll disk to install the OS on the new HDD

By the way Seagate Diskwizard is showing 4 days to create the 255GB image and came up with an error, which I hit 'Ignore All' to.

demanufactured

Don't waste your time trying to image a damaged drive.
Download a win 7 ISO file from digital river and burn. It to a DVD.
Use that to install Windows 7 and use the key on the bottom of the laptop to activate it.

Capt'n Midnight

yeah do a clean install and recover the data separately

pull recognisable files off it first
then photorec
partimage cd has ddrescue on - use with logfiles to scrape 1's and 0's off bare metal and then try and mount the image (use an offset for the mount pount) or photorec the image file