Running Vista
Out of warranty
Last night while wrapping up a C# assignment for a class in visual studio I went to open the file, to make sure it had saved. My computer started freezing up and then blue screened and reset itself. I began to get the blue screen of death on every reboot or else a hanging black screen. I've researched this to death but can't get any further. I will mention that I smacked my fist on the keyboard after it blue screened the first time, though I really didn't hit it that hard. lol...Worth mentioning as I am trying to cover all my bases. Booting into safe mode kept freezing at crcdsk.sys then blue screening again, then when I attempted the Vista recovery disk it froze at a black screen, which I left up all night and never finished loading. I attempted safe mode again. This time it kept stopping at disk.sys and then blue screening. I attempted to load windows with the option to not restart on failure to load windows, so I could read the bluescreen. The bluescreen is the Unmountable_boot_volume error. I tried many times, unsuccessfully to get my vista repair cd to start. After many attempts and a lot of patience, it finally loaded.
When I click repair my computer, It goes to list the operating systems, and finds nothing. So I click to select drivers and I see HP Recovery (D:) 1.89GB free of 7.9GB, and BOOT(X:) (don't know what that is) and Local Disk (C:) which shows nothing, and freezes up when you try to click it. Also my dvd drive with the vista recovery disc in it. So I clicked next and went into the system recovery options screen. I chose the startup repair option first. I let it run and this was what the results were at the end:
Root cause found: system volume on disk is corrupt.
repair action: file system repair (chkdsk)
result: completed successfully. error code = 0x0
time taken = 1441901ms
I was excited, thinking it had found a problem, and successfully fixed it so I was better off than I was in the beginning.
I clicked restart, and windows attempted to restart. I am not 100% sure if it actually restarted properly...It seemed to cutoff suddenly. I got the Bluescreen again upon restarting. I went into the BIOS to see if it could locate the HD. The Primary Hard drive test failed giving me a #1-07 error.
The next reboot sent me to the windows boot manager. Not sure how I got there but my options were to choose: windows setup (EMS enabled) or windows memory diagnostic tool. I tried the diagnostic tool first and got this:
file /boot/memtest.exe
status 0xc000000f
info: selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt.
I am going back into the recovery options screen now to attempt other fixes. I have heard that trying to open the laptop and reseat the HD may work, or downloading the HD diagnostic files and burning them to a bootable cd may work. I've also heard I should check the RAM. You guys are the pros and have been so helpful in the past so I figured I would come here and see what I should do. I need this computer...all my school work is on it and I would really like to be able to save the info at the very least. Another note, the HDD access light does blink while all of this is happening. And if my recovery disk (d:) shows up, why doesn't my local disk (c:)?? aren't they both stored on the hard drive? Should I attempt to restore the bios to default settings? I've also heard of people successfully booting linux and copying all of their files off the HD. Is this even an option or is my HD fried? where should I start? Thank you SO much! Sorry it was so long, just trying to be informative.