Windows 7 stopped booting

I have a laptop which after shutdown it stopped booting. I tried repair, safe mode, and even start with Windows 7 Installation. The screen just goes blank with a mouse pointer that I can move around.

I removed the harddrive from the laptop and connected it to my desktop using an External HD casing. The computer recognizes the disk, but it seems like it can't read it. If I go to My Computer it shows up, but it doesn't display usage information. When I double click on the drive it sits there as if it was loading something and eventually shows "G:\ is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect."

Disk Management and Diskpart also take forever to load and when it does it shows the drive.

My question, do you think this is a hardware problem or some corrupted sector? How can I try to fix the drive without formatting it?

Thanks...

Jonas Stawski

Posted 2011-01-05T17:37:16.047

Reputation: 910

Answers

Run error checking on the drive. Right click the drive in my computer, select properties, tools, then error checking. That should find any bad sectors, however it sounds like a bad drive.

Supercereal

Posted 2011-01-05T17:37:16.047

Reputation: 8 643

I fixed some bad sectors and the computer was able to boot. I then backed up all my data and are now waiting for a new drive to arrive. – Jonas Stawski – 2011-01-06T15:17:03.323

That sounds like a data corruption problem or hard disk firmware corruption. If you plug the drive in using your external enclosure under windows and right click on it, select properties, tools and go to error-checking, will windows allow you to run an error check on the disk? If the system cannot perform any interaction with the drive, it may just be that it's broken and it needs replacing.

One thing I have tried before which gave me a more conclusive answer was to run an Ubuntu live cd on your computer and then plug the hard disk in using your external case. Sometimes Ubuntu will even tell you if the drive is corrupted. If you need to create a live CD, the image is downloadable from http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download Good luck, hope this helps.

Jay_Booney

Posted 2011-01-05T17:37:16.047

Reputation: 389

By the sounds of it, you may not be able to fix the drive. I recommend running this and if it fails take the opportunity to get a brand new, quicker disk:

MHDD

I'd download a CD ISO of it from here.

Good Luck!

Umber Ferrule

Posted 2011-01-05T17:37:16.047

Reputation: 3 149