The battery power ran out on my HP G60 laptop and it shut down. Even after recharging, Windows 7 will now not start up. After any attempted startup, it bluescreens and takes me to the "Startup Repair (recommended)" / "Start Windows Normally" console screen.
"Startup Repair (recommended)" appears to be the right choice, but when I choose it, I get taken to a screen which appears to be System Recovery Options (it's the same wallpaper as the screenshots here: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/668-system-recovery-options.html). However, I just get a cursor with nothing else; no "System Recovery Options" window ever pops up. (A black console screen does pop up for a split-second but too fast to be able to read the text.) The empty screen with cursor hangs indefinitely.
System Recovery Options normally runs off of a partition on the laptop hard drive. When I got the laptop, I also created a System Repair Disc (in fact I have more than one) and when I try use any of them; they all result in the same wallpaper and empty screen with lone cursor. Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing.
The computer did not come with a Windows 7 installation disc, so there's no obvious way to reinstall Windows 7.
Safe mode does not work; startup fails and I just get sent back to the "Startup Repair (recommended)"/"Start Windows Normally" console screen. "Start in last good state" does not work either, same result as above.
Running a memory & hard disk check found no errors.
Do I have any options at all? "System Recovery Options" seems to be what I want, but the screen that is supposed to take me to them just hangs.
.
Best Answer
I figured this out on my own. The answer is "wait at least an hour".
It turns out that System Recovery was not actually completely hanging when I got the blank blue wallpaper. It was just running extremely, extremely slowly. I let the computer sit in the blank screen state for about 30 minutes, and then a window finally popped up and I was able to choose and go through the "Startup Repair" wizard.
So, it's possible that System Recovery may run very slowly and the user may have to be very patient. This isn't documented anywhere that I could find, so presumably this isn't the case for everyone. I had to wait for durations of 30 to 60 minutes between mouse clicks. Finally, after Startup Repair ran completely (it took about four hours), it asked me to restart and then Windows 7 started up fine then.