Windows 7 repair

A friend asked to see if I could fix her Acer Aspire 5332 laptop running Windows 7 as it wouldn't start up.

She brought it to me yesterday and I've had a look this afternoon. It started up into Windows load and then said (something like) Windows failed to start last time with options to Repair or load. Rightly or wrongly I chose Repair.

It went into the repair sequence and after a few minutes of activity, including a warning that it could take an hour (IIRC), said it needed to restart. It restarted and, for the past 3-4 hours, has been sitting with a largely blank screen, just the mouse 'arrow' cursor, which is moveable with the pad; in addition the HDD light is pulsing every half-second or so. So clearly some aspect of the system is running.

Anyone know if there's any way of knowing whether it's making any progress with the repair, or is it just 'twiddling its bits'?

How long should I leave it in this state?

Any thoughts about the consequences of forcing it to close and reboot?

Reboot the system and keep tapping F8

Select Last Known good configuration and see how hat goes.

Just switch it off, it wont case any problems... Try last known good as suggested, failing that, try running a CHKDSK on the volume. As usual, they've either done something seriously goofy OR there is a hardware problem for this to have occurred.

Thanks for both replies, I'm about to go out - to a Geek's evening and won't have chance to progress until tomorrow afternoon or later. I'll leave it running as it is until then - just in case (though I doubt anything will change).

Could always try a Bootfix and FixMBR from Command consul. It sounds like there is a corrupt file somewhere.

I got it to load via Last Known Good Configuration.

It seems a bit hit and miss at the moment as to whether it loads or hangs. The W7 setup is somewhat out of date, doesn't yet have SP1 so I'm trying to install that, so far unsuccessfully.

After 'installing' it reboots then goes to Configure Service Pack, that gets to 99% and then fails and reverses the update. I've Googled around and removed the AV, removed Trusteer Rapport which one forumee found cured his problem. I've run the readiness tool, all to no avail.

There seem to be a lot of Windows Update failures in the past, I only hope I don't have to install them one by one...

I feel if I can get SP1 to install then I can move forward, until then...

Any thoughts welcome.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

After 'installing' it reboots then goes to Configure Service Pack, that gets to 99% and then fails and reverses the update.

May be no help, but a Vista laptop did that to me once.

I did the same as you (removed AV etc), no joy. Eventually I did a major "clean-up"- deleted all temporary files, ran chkdsk, defragged the HDD, one or two other things that I forget now and then it worked.

But the full defrag took ages... eventually I just left it running and went to bed

I've run Ccleaner on it to get rid of much of that sort of stuff. I've just tried another time and it's failed again .

I'll defrag overnight and see how it behaves in the morning.

Dont bother with defrag, this is not the issue unless you have extremely low free space.

Download the Windows 7 SP1 Update Package directly from the Microsoft Website. The most probably cause (80-90%) is that the package downloaded via Windows Update has become corrupt. Yes you would expect it to just reject it before it gets deep into the stage of installing it but that is not always the case.

If this does not work

a1) disable Windows update fully
a) Run a CHKDSK /X
b) Reboot the computer once
c) Run disk cleanup
d) Run and install ALL available Windows Updates APART from Windows 7 SP1
e) Reboot the computer and continue to do this until the only package left is Windows 7 SP1
f) Run the downloaded SP1 update again from the download, not from Windows Update.
if this fails
g) run sfc /scannow from an elevated command prompt
if this passes
h) Check the windows update logs
if it reports integrity violations
i) consider reinstalling the OS, this should not normally report a problem, it is fixable, but it is probably quicker to reinstall the OS.

sorry post not pretty.

Edited by Pipexer (Tue 15-Jan-13 23:34:51)

ALT and F10 at start up...this will access the hidden image of the HDD and allow you to carry out a repair or factory reset. The repair will obviously preserve the data.