Windows 7 Windows 7 startup then says insert system disk

[Musick Man]

Hola Everyone,

Strange problems with my computer lately, and it has me completely stumped.

For about the past 2 weeks my computer has been becoming slower and slower on startup, and just general usage. And so today I decided to take some actions to try to make it startup faster and just run faster in general. So i ran msconfig, disabled some startup entries and some non microsoft services. Also, knowing that disabling the boot GUI made the computer startup faster, I disabled that also. Then when I went to restart, I ran into problems.

When I turned the computer on I knew it wouldnt show the bootGUI and so I let it just sit and do its thing. After a very long 15 minutes (longer then it ever had been before) with just a black screen, I held the power button to turn it off. Then turned it back on, and got to the windows recovery window. So I hit f8, went into safe mode, loaded up msconfig, and enabled the bootgui, and restarted.

This time it showed the boot gui. However, once the windows logo was shown for about 15 seconds it switched to a screen that said "Windows is loading files" With a loading bar under it. I had never seen this before so I just let it load at first. As I was waiting for it to load I went and got dinner. Roughly 30 minutes later I went back and it was still stuck at not eve 1/4th of the way. So I held the power button again, restarted, went through the whole process again and then it brought up a message that said the communication with the device was gone. And that it happens when you pull a flash drive out or a hard drive or DVD drive looses power.

I do not think that my hard drive is going back. It is about 5 months old. Along with the rest of my computer. Pretty new. 5 months about.

Any ideas on how I can restore my Windows 7? Thank you for the help!

Musick Man

System Specs:

Mainboard: MSI 970A-G54
Processor: AMD FX 8120 8 Core Processor
Ram: Patriot DDR3 8GB
Kingston DDR3 4GB
Graphics: 2x MSI N210's

 

[patcooke]

I'd first try a system restore to undo the startup changes. If that sorts things then have a look at autoruns,a free utility muchmore flexible and powerful than msconfig. It will enable you to disable/re-enable features to test startup changes. Free download from here:

Autoruns for Windows

 

[Musick Man]

Before I tried that, I ran into some other problems...

I wanted to make sure that all of my info was backed up so I plugged the hard drive into my macbook pro laptop using my external hard drive connector. When I went to back everything up, it showed all of the folders as being empty Very concerned by this, I then made it so I could see hidden files on my mac to see if they were all hidden. No luck. So then I took the drive and plugged it into my Ubuntu Studio computer, and again the same problem. It showed all of the folders as being empty Could it be I have a bad sector on my hard drive?

 

[patcooke]

Beginning to sound like things havegot seriously messed up to the point where even if you getrestarted there may well be problems left over. I'd consider running a full system recovery. After thatI'd use something Acronis True Image to make regular system images from which you can recover your system completein the event of something similarhappening in the future.