[zooey234]

I'm sorry ahead of time if this topic has already been answered but I wasn't even sure what to put in a search since our laptop is doing all kinds of strange things. A few months ago our Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop starting acting flaky and it would freeze up at the password screen or freeze at the black screen when we would power up the laptop. It started behaving weird again and we chose to never shut it down at night for fear of this happening again.

It had been just fine until yesterday morning when we opened up the laptop to enter our password and it was frozen at the black screen and it wouldn't prompt for the password as usual. My husband tried to reboot and that's when all the craziness started. Everytime we would reboot it would get to another screen before staying there forever and doing nothing. At one point it was at the Configuring updates screen Step 3 of 3 0% complete for over an hour before we shut down again. We were finally able to get Windows and our desktop up by starting through Safe Mode but after powering down for the night we were unable to get it back up today.

Now today it's a host of other weird problems and we were unable to get it started in normal start-up OR Safe Mode. In Safe Mode it would run the system check but then it would either freeze at the blue Windows Vista screen or it would freeze at the point where we put our password in. In normal start-up it would go straight to a black screen and Chkdsk would start and when that was done it would say that the system was restarting. It would then go to the black screen w/the MS Corp logo and stay on that forever or it would freeze at password entry again. At one point I received a message stating that "an unauthorized change was made to windows and to click here to learn more online". I clicked where it told me and it said something about a file being corrupt and it took me right back to the Chkdsk page only this time when it was done it actually brought up Windows and my desktop and I am currently on the laptop now. However, I'm afraid that the minute I shut this down or put it to sleep it will happen all over again.

I'm sorry for the length of this post but this laptop has been doing a number of strange things and I wanted to try and get them all in here so that it can be better diagnosed. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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Sounds like a failing hard drive.

Run a Hard Drive Diagnostic: http://www.tacktech....ay.cfm?ttid=287 or http://www.bleepingc...topic28744.html. (Make sure you select one appropriate for your brand of hard drive).

Depending on the program, it'll create bootable floppy or a bootable CD. If the downloaded file is an ".iso" file, use ImgBurn: http://www.imgburn.com/ to burn the ".iso" to a CD, (use the "Write image file to disc" option), and make the CD bootable.

[SpywareDr]

Sounds like a failing hard drive.

Run a Hard Drive Diagnostic: http://www.tacktech....ay.cfm?ttid=287 or http://www.bleepingc...topic28744.html. (Make sure you select one appropriate for your brand of hard drive).

Depending on the program, it'll create bootable floppy or a bootable CD. If the downloaded file is an ".iso" file, use ImgBurn: http://www.imgburn.com/ to burn the ".iso" to a CD, (use the "Write image file to disc" option), and make the CD bootable.

[zooey234]

Thank you, I will try that. I really hope that you are wrong about the hard drive failing because I can't afford a new hard drive or a new computer!

[SpywareDr]

I do understand, (been there).

Since *-ALL-* mechanical hard drives *-will fail-* however, a backup (copy) strategy is the only sure way to prevent data loss.