How-To Geek

Hey guys, I work for my school's computer lab support.

A student brought in her Sony Vaio laptop when we were about to close so I didn't get much info out of it. I'm going to be working on it tomorrow and in order to save time and frustration I would love to hear you guys' suggestions and advice.

Here all I know as of now:

She claims she downloaded and installed some Windows updates then it just restarted and never be able to boot back into Windows 7 again. It, instead, goes directly to the start-up repair upon boot.

The repair runs for a while then gives up and says it can't fix the problem.

Shots in the dark. Just throw out whatever you guys think could be the problem.

Could it be boot-sector virus? Damaged MBR? etc.

Thanks.

Hi Drizzle, what's the removing & replacing the battery got anything to do it?

Ok, so system restore -> Noted. Thanks

Assume that's the solution. What'd cause such problem? And how to prevent it from happening again?

Oh wow, if that's indeed the fix then that's sweet. Nice insight. Thanks both.

Other possibilities, suggestions, guesses are welcome :)

Interesting because I thought RAM is temporary memory, it's supposed to clear once shutdown. Anyway, I'm going to work soon, will try the battery trick and let you guys know.

Thanks

Will it boot into safe mode?

If yes change the graphics card to use the standard VGA graphics

If the computer now boots in normal mode the graphics card has gone

They were prone to overheating and Nevada extended there warranty

systerm restore didn't work either.

Sometimes you have to let W7 run startup repair several times for it to repair corrupted or replace missing system files. You might also try memory diagnostic.

GUYS guys, I got it fixed completely by luck. Ok, so for those who stumbled upon the same problem. Here's how. I basically lost hope and was about the reformat but I was fiddling in xxxxxxxx and decide to delete the MBR, rewrite a new windows 7 MBR, then i fix boot then it said something about MBR is not flag to boot and if I wanna change that and I did. When i restart, it says no operating system found. So I thought I screwed up big time as it wouldn't even boot into Startup repair like before that means I won't even be able to restore from the recovery partition. I decided that is it and reformat, I put the Windows 7 OEM disc in and was about reformat but for some reason I click "Repair" just for the heck of it and amazingly it did repaired successfully and rebooted. It said system sucessfully restored to 09/01/2011, no files were affected or something along that line.

tl;dr: delete MBR, rewrite clean MBR, fixboot, repair from OEM 7 disc = fix the problem

Thanks everyone for helping.

Edit by mod. That is illegal software, and is not to be mentioned on this forum.

Hello andkobe, have you tried system restore it to an earlier date? Usually this would fix the problem. In my case it did not. But try that first and see how it goes. If you're having the same problem as I did, when you boot up, startup repair will run but it will fail. Just close it and you will see "more advance repair options" or something along the line. You click on it and it will ask for your username and password. After you get in, you will see this window, choose "system restore". It will show you a list of dates in the past to restore back to, if it only shows you 2 or 3 restore points, there's an option somewhere that will show you all the restore points. Then restore to a desirable date.

If that won't work then get back to me.