Windows 7 not booting up and stuck at startup repair

bootwindows 7

I've been having issues with Windows 7 Home Premium on a Lenovo laptop.

At first, it would not start up normally at all. I started it in Safe Mode, where I disabled all non-MS services and tried again to no avail. It then goes into Startup repair where it failed several times. I tried copying the original registry settings, still the same.

I resorted to booting with an Ubuntu DVD, where I ran the boot-repair, where it is supposed to correct the Windows boot. No luck.

I used Win7 DVD to start up from there, where I had the option to install or repair. I chose the repair, got into command prompt, ran chkdsk /i /r, where it found 3 unreadable segments, went through the 2nd step without issues, and the 3rd step completed with some errors (can't recall the exact errors).

When I restarted the machine, it went to straight to the Stratup Repair, indicating "Attempting repairs… Repairing dis errors. This might take over an hour to complete." It's been like this for nearly 15 hours.

When I try to cancel or close the Startup Repair window, I get a message "The current repair operation cannot be cancelled."

Should I let it run or force shut the machine? If force shut, how can I resolve this problem?

Thanks.

Best Answer

  1. It looks like an HDD failure or a corruption in your partition, formatting is your best bet.
    • The ubuntu DVD won't fix windows boot, it'll install its own boot loader.
  2. You can make a backup safely from a bootable live linux distro (like ubuntu) to an external HDD.
    • If you don't have another HDD you can use gparted from ubuntu to create a small partition at the end of your HDD to save your files. Be careful, you won't be able to wipe the disk completely and maybe you could end with some bad sectors left.
  3. You can also use that live image to check your HDD's status and SMART data with the gnome-disks app to know if it's ultimately faulty/prone to fail.
    • You may need to install these apps, so in case they're not already there you may run apt-get install gparted gnome-disks from any terminal emulator.
  4. Once you've made a backup of your data you can create a new partition table and wipe your HDD completely with gparted.

This is Gparted Gparted

This is the Gnome Disks Utility Gnome Disks The blue selected text is where you'll be warned in case your disk is failing (the text would even be red). You can run SMART tests from that app too.

Sorry for the text only response, I'm on my phone right now. Good luck.

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