Laptop Not Booting

[meltron]

My laptop won't boot. It goes through post and I get the windows progress/activity bar for a bit, then it just sits there. Nothing happening. I tried booting off of dvd. It goes through loading files, then I get windows progress/activity bar at bottom, then nothing again. First thought was bad HD which is why I tried to boot off dvd. But, same result. I've also switched RAM, but that wasn't it either. What could it be?

 

[mamaloglu]

i Had the same problem with my laptop too. It was hp. The only thing that i did was to recover my data thru a hard disk to usb cable, then hard reset, and installed new windows

 

[meltron]

I'm not sure what you mean by "hard reset?" But I dont think that this would help. It's not booting off of the dvd drive. It's responding the same as it does when trying to boot off of HDD: after post, the windows progress bar thing appears at the bottom of the display then goes away and nothing happens for a very long time. I can get it to boot options when booting off of HDD. And, anything I choose - safe mode, repair this computer, start windows normally, etc. responds the exact same way as described above. When booting off of windows dvd, same thing happens. gets to "press any key to boot from cd, dvd," and i press key. Then responds exactly as above, except before i get the "loading files" bit at the bottom of the screen then windows progress bar thing, then nothing happening. I'm not sure how reinstalling windows onto another HDD is going to help if I can't even boot off of windows disc from dvd drive...?

 

[ron57]

I had something similar happen.

Purely by luck I unplugged the two external usb devices I had and was able to get a complete boot.

Once completely booted up:

1. I got rid of as much junk as possible to free up space as it was over 95% full

2. I then ran a good malware removal tool

3. I followed up with a a good 3rd party defrag. The one I ran was able to

run transparently and with very little space requirements.

4 After this i did a system restore to 1 month before adding my usb devices.

5. The system restore then prompted a lot of windows updates and driver re-inststalls which I did

The system went back to normal

Looking back, I've noticed that I tend to get way more random

unexplainable problems when I neglect regularly defragmenting the drive.

Also as the drive gets fuller the fragmentation seems to accelerate

markedly. Since then my go-to PM solution has been to run a good 3rd party

defrag that can run automatically and transparently to make sure this whole aspect of normal drive maintenance actually

gets done and it's noticeably decreased the number of issues I get. I

pass this along for what it's worth.

There are a lot of good 3rd party defrags out there check this link out to

find out more:

TOP DEFRAG REVIEW 2011

Hope this helps

Cheers

 

[meltron]

I know this thread is old. But, turns out it was a bad HDD. And, apparently Vista, when booting off CD/DVD loads the files from the DVD to the HDD. I had pulled the HDD to run some diagnostics and discovered that the HDD was failing. After installing a new HDD, everything works.
Interesting point - why use the HDD when booting from disc? I thought the whole point was to be able to troubleshoot HDD by booting off CD/DVD?
Anyway, thanks for the suggestions.

 

[meltron]

Best answer selected by meltron.