xxvousxx

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i have a friends laptop here who's windows seems to off stopped working, upon turning the laptop on it says windows failed to start, and you have the option to start normally, or launch repair, well after you get that little grren loading bar that says microsoft under it, both of these options end in a blank screen (there is a mouse that i can move, but nothing else) that wont go away, ok clearly i assume corrupted windows best thing to do is to use the vista disk. well this laptop has no disk drive, so i decide since vista sucks as it is and i have windows 7. i decide to make a bootable flash drive with windows 7. well i boot from the flash drive, windows is loading files message, then after the little windows animation goes away, i get another blank screen.

anyone know what to do here?
 

edmond419

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try booting the laptop. once the green bar goes away, wait for up to 30 minutes, or even 2 hours or so. It'll eventually come. If even after two hours it doesn't unblank then try going into safemode.
 

xxvousxx

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hmm this is weird, after leaving the blank screen on start repair for about 15min, it now has a background that is black and white, yet still no menu, curious to see what will happen if i leave it longer
 

edmond419

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Does safe mode work? If not, try pressing 'start windows normally', and right after you press the button press F8 repeatedly, and get a menu. Select something like "disable automatic restart on system failure". It should show a blue screen after the green bar. Write down and post here a the first 3-7 lines of the screen plus the last 5 lines..or if its allowed take a picture with your camera and uploaded here
 

xxvousxx

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k i see a blue screen but only for a split second, ill see if i can get it to stay longer, in repair though it doesnt detect an OS, and asks me to insert disk (which i cant do), but allows me to search through files on computer
 

edmond419

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press 'start windows normally'. Then, the moment immediately after pressing 'enter' to select the option, repeatedly press F8, then select 'disable automatic system restart on failure' or something like that. If you can't get it, then when you get that failure message, press CONTROL+ALT+DELETE to reboot the computer, then after the brand name (hp, toshiba, sony(vaio), etc..) disappeared off the screen, then press F8 repeatedly, but if it asks you for a disk to boot from, select the hard drive and press F8 repeatedly until you get to a menu that has the 'disable automatic restart on failure' option. Select it
 

edmond419

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..."unmountable boot volume"...

Does the computer rattle while it starts, and how often? I thinking that it might be a faulty hard drive...or maybe from a damaged file system.

To try to fix it, find a windows xp CD, insert it, let it run, and select "R" to repair option, select your windows xp, then once ready, type in the administrator password, but I believe it will be blank, so just hit enter. Then, type without quotes "chkdsk /r". After its finished, try booting your computer. If it still doesn't work, then I would consider formatting your hard drive and reinstalling windows, and doing this will result in all the data on the hard drive being erased.