[ryanthefantastic]

Hello,

I'm working on my friend's laptop that has a problem booting into Win7. When booting, it goes from the original Dell boot screen to the Win7 "Starting Windows" screen (each taking forever) until it just reboots and loops.

I've looked at the BIOS but nothing seems out of the ordinary. I tried booting from the install disk to try and repair, and the computer tells me it's booting from the disk, but nothing more than a cursor shows on the screen and it's done nothing more for 30+ minutes now.

It's a Dell Inspiron 1525, 2ghz, 3gb ram, and originally had 32bit Vista Basic. Her brother helped her upgrade (clean install or not, i'm not sure) to Win7 Home Premium.

Any ideas on what I could do?

[amon91]

That problem can indeed be pretty frustrating. Have you tried Safe Mode? (press F8 when the computer starts booting up).

[PSYCH0]

Use memtest 86+ to check the RAM and The HDD manu's diagnostic tool and check the drive for errors (Dell has traditionally used IBM/Fujitsu drives, but the Bios should tell you what manufacturer).

[ryanthefantastic]

@ amon91: I tried your suggestion of booting into Safe Mode but it results in the exact same screen and behavior. In fact, when the list of drivers (I think they're drivers) appears when starting Safe Mode, the list hangs on classpnp.sys. I looked classpnp.sys up to find people with this same problem but I couldn't find any real help.

@ PSYCH0: What is memtest 86+ exactly? You stated that it checks the RAM and HDD, but what does it do? Does it gauge the health of the disc or something?

I also have tried running Ubuntu from the disc drive and replacing the classpnp.sys file but I get an error when trying to access the hard drive despite having zero problems accessing my HDD on another computer.

I'm starting to think this might be a HDD problem... yuck

[amon91]

If Ubuntu runs fine I doubt it's a memory problem. Backing everything up and reinstalling could be the best solution at this point.

[ryanthefantastic]

How would I go about backing up the data if I can't access the hard drive at all? Should I contact Dell support?

[amon91]

Try connecting your HDD to another computer or if you can, use BartPE. You'll need an XP disk but if you do have one, a bootable recovery disk will hopefully let you access your drive.

[PSYCH0]

Memtest only tests the RAM, and it does so by putting a pattern into the RAM and then confirming that the same pattern comes back out. You'll need a hard disk diagnostic utility from your harddrive manufacturer to test the disk. Alternately, you can download and burn a copy of Hiren's boot CD. It has the diagnostic utilities from all the major disk manufacturers.

[ryanthefantastic]

@ amon91: I have a XP install disk, however, would that even help me with this Windows 7 problem? Sure, I guess I could build the PE disk but would that apply to 7 if the disk was built from XP?

[amon91]

It would at least help you get to the drive and back up your important stuff/make sure it's there. But plugging it into another computer would save you a lot of time.

[ryanthefantastic]

ok. I've consulted with my friend and we've decided to just wipe and reinstall the OS. how would I go about doing so since I couldn't get anything out of the Win7 install disk?

would I have to take the HDD out of the computer to reformat or could I do so with Ubuntu?

any help would be just great. Thanks so much

[amon91]

Well, in order to reinstall Windows you need the install disk and that alone, if you don't have it you won't be able to reinstall. However, some computers come with restore disks/partitions that will let you restore your PC to factory settings.

[ryanthefantastic]

That's the trouble. I have the install disk and I know how to reinstall the OS under normal circumstances, but the trouble is that I don't even get any kind of GUI at all even after making sure that I'm booting from the disk. Because of this, I don't even have the option to reinstall or anything from the original Win7 disk.

Just to make sure I'm explaining clearly:
With the install disk in, I press the power button and the Dell boot screen appears. Because I have the disk drive first on the boot order, the disk spins and asks if I want to boot from the disk. It shows a status bar and says that Windows is loading files (everything I've seen has been in the "command line"/DOS interface). From there the only thing that happens is a black screen as the drive works away. I've given the computer 45+ minutes to bring up the normal Windows GUI that I'm used to to with no luck.

I'm pretty stuck.

[ryanthefantastic]

Oh, also of note, I booted off my live Ubuntu CD yesterday to see if I could save some files.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with Ubuntu (I'm pretty new myself) but I was working with Terminal to force mount the hard drive and I ran into some errors. I ran "fdisk -l" (in terminal) to see information about the HD. The HD is partitioned into the regular partition and the recover partition (this I knew before runing "fdisk -l").

The part that puzzled me is I got something to the effect of "Partition 2 doesn't end on a cylinder boundary". To me it seemed that the main partition was fractured or something like that. I'll post a screenshot if you'd like me to.

I was able to mount what seemed like only half the hard drive and I continued to get errors about the other half.

Does this have anything do to with the problems I'm having? Please please let me know.

Thank you!

[amon91]

That's either a read error or yes, there could be a file system corruption, but the HDD doesn't necessarily have to be bad. If you have all the data backed up, delete all the partitions, create new ones and they appear fine then problem solved.

[ryanthefantastic]

how would I go about deleting the partitions and completely wiping the HD because I can't take it out of the computer (because it's a laptop)?

[amon91]

You can do it through Ubuntu itself, assuming you have all your important data backed up, remember it will be lost. Go to System > Administration > Disk Utility. If you don't want to take any risks, show us a screnshot of that so we can tell you what to delete.

[ryanthefantastic]

I've got off the hard drive everything I needed. I'll give it a shot through Ubuntu and I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks

[ryanthefantastic]

All seems well. I formatted and deleted the partition on the HD and reinstalled 7.

I still have a question though. Windows installed just fine, but when it prompted me to enter the product key and I typed it in, it said that the product key was incorrect. I left the field blank and continued on. Windows didn't bug me to enter the product key again and finished installation.

How can it be that it doesn't like its own legit product key? Is this going to cause any problems?

[amon91]

Glad it worked. Not entering a product key during setup will leave the system working fine but unactivated. If you don't activate it with your own product key within 30 days, it'll start crippling your experience. Go to Start, right-click my computer, hit properties then activate Windows. Follow the on-screen instructions. Does your key work fine there? If not what error are you getting?