Win7 not booting past 'Starting Windows' screen

Firstname-Lastname

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Jun 24, 2014
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Hello,

I have a laptop (4yo, Acer Aspire 5742G w/ original hardware except a new hard drive) with dualboot Windows 7 64 bits (pre-installed) and Ubuntu 12.04.

This morning I turned my laptop on, and selected Windows in the Grub-menu. It showed me the 'Starting Windows' screen with the flashing orbs making the windows-logo, then the screen went black. After a minute or so I turned the laptop off with the power-button, and tried again. No difference.
At this point, I had already seen the 'Windows cannot load properly' screen, something about new hardware. (There is no new hardware, except my mouse wasn't hooked up before booting, which usually isn't such a big deal). So on the next try, I selected the Windows Recovery-option.
After a couple of minutes searching for problems, it asked me if I wanted to restore the system to an earlier point, to which I said no. My last system-restore point is many months ago, and I'd rather not lose all my data. Then it said 'Restoring system' underneath the loading bar, and when I pressed ESC / clicked 'cancel' / clicked the X at the top-right of the screen, it said ' cannot cancel this system restore' or something like that. So I let it run for a couple of minutes more, without any change.
Now I turned it off again, and since I luckily have another OS, I booted to that one which works without any problems and on which I am also writing this message. I am also able to load (mount?) the windows part of the hard drive and do stuff.

Specs:
Acer Aspier 5742G with original specs except a new harddrive, which is also already a year old
I've tried buying new RAM, but all the RAM I bought was DOR, so I put my old RAM back in, everything worked fine.
I've had problems with USB-ports suddenly stopping and starting again, so while gaming I would have no mouse for a couple of seconds, as an example.
The Windows 7 64bit OS was preinstalled when I bought the laptop around 4 years ago, I installed Ubuntu 12.04 around September/October 2013.

I still used it yesterday to try programming JAVA in NetBeans 8, and everything was working just fine!

Any solutions to how I can boot to Windows again?
 

Firstname-Lastname

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Jun 24, 2014
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Which testing tools? How do I run this 'SMART' test?
It doesn't say I can, only the regular or the system-recovery mode (recommended). No safemode. I'll check again, though.
 

Firstname-Lastname

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Jun 24, 2014
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Well, this is awkward... After trying the normal booting option again, it showed me 'Starting Windows' with the dots creating the logo, then a black screen for ~10 seconds, and booted as usual (even as slow as usual)...

I'll run the HDTune you suggested, and post back what it concludes.

EDIT: There indeed was no option like 'Safe mode' only System-restore and normal boot...

EDIT 2: Here are a couple of screenshots, will post the full scan later this afternoon.
Seems that dropbox photo's don't want to be visible, so these are links to them

Benchmark
Info screen
Quick Scan
 

Firstname-Lastname

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Jun 24, 2014
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Hahaha yes it was :p

The health tab shows absolutely nothing... Not even 'Power on Time' or 'Health Status' : 'n/a' to both...
I'll start a full scan in a few minutes and let it run while i'm going out for half an hour, and post the results to that when I get back.

EDIT: It's running for almost 2 hrs now, and we're only roughly halfway... This is going to take a lot of time :( So far only green squares though, a good sign!

EDIT 2: Well, after more than 4 hours, we're finally here! Nothing but green squares however... Health tab still doesn't say anything, can't find any buttons there either. Oh well.
Full Scan
 

Firstname-Lastname

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Jun 24, 2014
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aaaaaaaand we're back...
After numerous reboots this afternoon (I think 4 or 5), that all ended up the same (run through BIOS Setup, load GRUB menu, choose Windows OS), I had either of two possibilities: choose 'Start Windows Normally ' or (something with repairing). I chose to start normally two times, but the other three times simply started checking disk for writing errors (?) and started doing all sorts of checks. Weird thing is, the percentages it showed were waaay off (51% of 295.000 files done, apparently means ~280.000 files done?) and it found only 4 errors the first time.

Second time it went by pretty quick, I don't remember seeing any problems. So I tried booting normally again, again blackscreen past loading the windows flags logo...

By this time I went ahead and rebooted to Ubuntu, which works perfectly fine.

Any ideas what caused it?
Bad HD? Bad memory?

I just want to say, I'm hoping to move out after this summer, get a room for myself and immediately buy a desktop with some better specs as this one (and a Raspberry Pi :D ), and only use the laptop as secondary. Therefore, replacing some parts with cheaper, less powerful, but brand new parts will not really be a problem. I just want this thing to work properly... (read: watch youtube movies and do the occasional programming at University where I cannot drag my desktop with me :p )

EDIT: installed SmartMonTools couple o' minutes ago, ran a short test and conveyance test.
Will do a long test tomorrow, since it's a little longer (2 and 5 minutes vs 165 minutes aka 2hrs 45 mins).
Results:

Short:
Code:
me@me:~$ sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda
smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.5.0-45-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, [url=http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net]http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net[/url]

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      2519         -

Conveyance:
Code:
 me@me:~$ sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda
smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.5.0-45-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, [url=http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net]http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net[/url]

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Conveyance offline  Completed without error       00%      2519         -
# 2  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      2519         -
(probably a bit overkill since the result of the first test shows up twice?)

Though I get the idea that this only checks for the Ubuntu partition, and not the Windows partition, aka my C: drive... Am I correct or just mumbling utter nonsense?


EDIT:
Okay what?
This morning I tried booting to windows, I got asked to start normally or run system restore. I chose start normal. Then I was told Windows would do a disk check, which I could (and did) cancel within 10 seconds.
Then the screen froze (probably for the remainder of those 10 seconds), and asked my password.
Gettin' real tired of your stuff, laptop... :S