My son is running Win 7 Ultimate but for some reason the PC will not boot. I tried a Repair Disc and got it going, but then in the morning tried again and it will not boot at all.

Pressed F8 and pressed Esc to go to DVD to boot but it will not. Can hit DEL at start up to view boot list etc but cannot affect changes.

So basically I got it working, but then it will not....and will not boot from repair disc.

Does anyone know of any tools for registry repair or the like I could get to make this PC go again? Maybe it is hardware....but as it went propoerly, I am thinking it is software. I cannot get past a blinking cursor.

any help appreciated - thanks

Failing HDD?

should at least find the repair disk even if the HDD is toast

Yeh, sounds like hardware. If it's not booting from the DVD or repair disk, something is cactus with the PC. You're not even getting to the HDD.

thanks. Was thinking that, but on the 32nd go it booted up to normal windows so I went to bed. Next morning it would not boot at all. Tried it another 30 times and had to go home. It is a buggar as he has a PC for gaming and any new replacement is going to cost a lot....for the gaming video card.

Do the usual thing. Check / reseat memory. Any other cards too.

Will work on it. Has a 1GB video card. Perhaps an ebay PC might be the go.

Power supply? Always first place to check. Might have lost the 12v rail, or the other one???

Maybe the ROM BIOS is toast..... happened to me about 12 years ago curtesy of a virus.

I'd reseat the RAM, disconnect the hard drive (power and SATA cable) and see if you can boot a bootable CD/DVD.

If that fails, disconnect the DVD drive as well, download Ubuntu and follow the instructions for making a bootable USB stick. With all drives disconnected, see if you can boot off that.

If it still won't boot I'd suspect the motherboard. If you have to change that and your Windows is an OEM version then you might have activation problems afterwards.

Is it a Dell ?

Is there any beep / LED codes ?

Is time correct in BIOS ?

check the video card connections and power, reseat the card. Any new drivers installed recently? How old is the PC? Could be the mobo.... You could always by a cheap disk and rebuild, keeping the original as a second disk and get the data of it after the rebuild....

oh, one more thing u can try..... If it has an onboard viedo card disconect the 1GB video card and see if it boots without it

I had trouble with it not loading and doing a Continues loop from start up to repear mode back to start up. New HD was the fix

^^^ this is worth a try too

Thanks I will try those solution suggestion. The system time has gone astray - something I noticed on that one time I got to windows. As it was built by an IT friend of my son's mum, it is a mashup of hardware....so no specific branding.

If the time has gone astray then you'll most likely have a flat BIOS battery. It's a round one on the motherboard like you find in watches. If that goes flat, then every time you shut down your BIOS settings will reset, which could explain it not booting as you may need to reset the boot device etc.

Unfortunately "agent" you may have already done the damage by attempting to repair and existing W7 Partition something which is potentially catastrophic for the OS and it's bootmgr , easy way out that I can see if the OS is shot is to create a Boot disk with Bart PE and copy any and all salvageable data like User Profile Documents Program info (usually in Profile) BUT can be stored as files under your "My Documents" if these are like mine and well away from "C:\",

My son's Lappy had a similar issue recently where repeatedly but somewhat randomly it would not boot, check the BIOS and sure enough Boot priority had changed or been changed but person or persons or software unknown.

The MoBo in this PC was exhibiting similar traits until recently when I discovered that 1 SATA HDD Channel has failed and intermittently communicates with the HDD this is enough to upset the BIOS on Boot Up because it cannot seek the Drive it has been allocated to boot from.

thanks again....will examine all this

Try fdisk /mbr

sounds like the master boot record is cactus.

Could always see if "format C:" solves the problem.

I will get to this....it is my son's PC and he lives 350km from my place so I don't get to see him often enough. Think I'll take it home with me to fix if I cannot do on site.....and thanks

Hmmm....thanks for all the input here. I tried the PC again last weekend and it booted up normally first attempt. Then it did it again....I was happy. Then, the next day, it would not boot. I am beginning to think there is a driver compatibility issue happening. Win tells me it has disabled one that has potential problems....and this is only after installing The settlers game for my son. Maybe that game has the issue / driver. Think I might go for a re-install as it appears the hardware is all OK, particularly the 1GB graphics card.

As an aside. I recently lost the PCIe slot on my motherboard. Suspecting it was the graphics card and with no onboard graphics or replacement card to swap and being overdue for an upgrade I purchased a new motherboard, CPU, ram etc etc. Only I hadn't been able to uninstall or backup from the old OS install due to the nature of the crash. So I just plugged the old hard drives straight into the new board. Obviously this wouldn't boot not the least because I was changing from AMD to Intel system amongst other problems. I used Paragon recovery software on another comp to create one of their bootable recovery discs. Threw it in my cd drive, it stripped all the appropriate drivers for the old mobo, CPU and accessories and replaced them with the appropriate variety in under 5 mins. Comp was back up and running beautifully on all the new gear.

Now it says you don't need to worry about a clean reinstall if Windows once you get up and running but I did that anyway after backing up.

Simply brilliant software, should you ever have a system fail unexpectedly with no chance of backup prior.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/