Windows 7 Laptop not booting Windows at all.

[sck003]

After installing updates on my Toshiba Satellite L305 I turned my computer on and it ran very slowly for about 2-3 minutes until the screen just went black. After a few minutes and attempts at ctrl-alt-delete I turned my computer off and restarted and a screen pops up asking if I want to Launch Startup Repair (recommended) or Start Windows Normally. If I choose to launch the start up repair it says windows is loading files... and a loading bar quickly fills and the screen goes black again. If I choose to start normally it just goes straight to the black screen.

 

[sck003]

Sorry, If I choose the Option to Start Windows Normally it goes to a black screen that says starting windows (like it should), but then the screen fills with small blue rectangles and a black square appears where the windows emblem should and it stays on that screen

 

[sck003]

If I start in safe mode I get a blue Screen saying

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check to be sure you have adequate disk space. If a driver is identified in the Stop message, disable the driver or check with the manufacturer for driver updates. Try changing video adapters.

Check with your hardware vendor for any BIOS updates. Disable BIOS memory options such as caching or shadowing. If you need to use safe mode to remove or disable components, restart your computer, press F8 to select Advanced Startup options, and then select Safe Mode.

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x0000007E (oxFFFFFFFFC0000005, 0xFFFFF80002195B5E, 0xFFFFF88001F6F4C8, 0xFFFFF88001F6ED20)

 

[Mike]

Can you run built-in diagnostics from Toshiba before booting? Is the laptop still under warranty? Either the on-board graphics adapter is failing or a critical hard drive event took place. I would go so far as to boot into the BIOS and just see if it doesn't crash there for awhile. Also check the temperature if you can. The small blue rectangles either indicate video corruption, hard disk drive failure, or corruption of the OS / malware of some kind. You really want to perform some hardware diagnostics on the display adapter and hard drive outside of Windows at this stage. Continuing to attempt to boot into the system this way can result in lost data. There is still a chance, if it is the hard drive that is going, that you could get the data off the drive if you do not keep booting into it and restarting the machine.

 

[Mike]

The stop error very likely has nothing to do with BIOS shadowing - it is somewhat of a legacy error. What it usually indicates is a memory (RAM) issue or paging to disk error (indicating hard drive problems). The mainboard could even be failing, but you have narrowed it down somewhat to RAM and hard drive. Most of the time its hard drive, but if its RAM, it may be the sticks or the entire motherboard.

 

[sck003]

So if it could be a problem with the RAM and I have other sticks laying around could I just replace them and see if that helps?

 

[Mike]

You have laptop memory just laying around? Yes, it is unusual for you to have it on inventory, but if they are compatible you could try it as process of elimination. There are utility disks that help you diagnose hardware errors, however. For example, running memtest86+ will thoroughly test the memory for errors. I would want to run something like that before just swapping RAM - but if the swap immediately solves your problem...