Windows 7 Win 7 home 32 bit home edtion is stuck on the starting windows screen

[Sorren66]

Hello-

My 2 year old $400 Acer laptop that has win 7 32 bit home edition locked up while surfing last night and I cannot get it to open. I tried safe mode it hangs up on the starting windows screen. I hit F8 and tried the launch start up repair function to no avail. What else should I try?

When the laptop locked up the screen went off white like someone was trying to IM me and nothing opened. I pulled the battery out to shut the laptop down since I didn't like the look of what was happening and none of the buttons or other prompts would work.

I have a current version of McAffe and was using Firefox. Any ideas areas to try?

Thanks

 

[Trouble]

Sorren66;
Hello and welcome to the forums.
First and this is not likely to resolve your issue, but it's always something to try when a laptop fails to boot fully.
Turn it off, unplug it from any AC power source and then remove the battery. Open the lid and press and hold the power button for a very slow count of 10. Wait an additional 5 minutes or so and then replace the battery, connect the AC power and see if it boots normally.
Failing this and assuming that you can still not boot the machine even in safe mode you may want to try launching the command prompt from the repair options (Recovery Environment) when booting from the install media and using the bcdedit utility to repair the Win7 boot files.
Alternately if you suspect some type of virus or malware infection and it sounds vaguely like you may. You might want to try this
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There is a comprehensive user guide for this utility here page 51 of which describes how to perform the update process. You need to have an internet connection and a wired one is best although they have added some support for wireless connections but not all work well.
Hope this helps and keep us posted.
Regards
Randy

 

[Sorren66]

Thanks for the input. Had a techie friend take a look and he diagnosed a damaged hard drive. He has the tools to recover most of my data and said this is a common failure on most laptops due to less than gentle treatment. Guilty as charged. I will be able to replace the hard drive for about $60 and lost a couple of weeks worth of data.

Still, since I only paid $400 for this laptop almost 2 years ago thru TigerDirect I think its still a good buy, especially since my 1st laptop ten years ago was about $3000 and suffered a similar death. Good news on that one was it was a work laptop and I did not have to pay to get it replaced.