I've been trying to get my girlfriend's computer working again over the last few weeks, and I've reached a point where I'm completely stumped. Here's what's going on. (Apologies in advance if this should be in Hardware - it has relevance to both Windows and Hardware so I just plumped for one. Please go ahead and move it if necessary.)
A few weeks ago, Windows 7 ceased booting properly on her laptop (a Lenovo G560, must be about four years old now). That is to say, the motherboard is fine: Windows gets as far as loading the blue login screen background, but stops there. If I try to get it to boot into recovery mode, it loads the background, *sometimes* lets me pick a language and hit "ok", and then displays that blue background image forever. Her laptop has a button for booting into a special Lenovo recovery mode (OneKey Recovery) but the same thing happens: the background image is loaded, and then everything grinds to a halt.
I can boot using an Ubuntu live cd with no problem whatsoever, and the file system on the drive appeared to be perfectly intact until I finally obtained an enclosure for it today and connected it up to my laptop (also Windows 7) via USB, and found that Windows wanted me to format her system partition before use. Explorer displays no information about the size or free space of the partition, and Computer Management claims that the partition's nothing but RAW data, despite the fact that Ubuntu recognises the partition as NTFS, as does TestDisk running on Windows. The other partitions display correctly and are explore-able.
I can even access the contents of her drive via PartitionGuru on my laptop, and perform copy/paste operations from her hard drive to mine, although navigating her system partition is INCREDIBLY slow in comparison to the others.
If anyone has any ideas as to what may have gone wrong with the system partition and how I might fix it, I'd be grateful for any suggestions. Could it, for example, be a problem with the boot sector of the system partition, or with the Master Boot Record? I don't know how seriously a problem with either of those would cripple the HD's functioning. Windows never booted again after she turned the laptop off at the button during the startup sequence a couple of times one after the other, but then again, she only did so because it had already become increasingly unreliable, which makes me wonder if this isn't just her hard drive dying a bit of a slow death - but then why does it work perfectly in every respect except booting?
A few weeks ago, Windows 7 ceased booting properly on her laptop (a Lenovo G560, must be about four years old now). That is to say, the motherboard is fine: Windows gets as far as loading the blue login screen background, but stops there. If I try to get it to boot into recovery mode, it loads the background, *sometimes* lets me pick a language and hit "ok", and then displays that blue background image forever. Her laptop has a button for booting into a special Lenovo recovery mode (OneKey Recovery) but the same thing happens: the background image is loaded, and then everything grinds to a halt.
I can boot using an Ubuntu live cd with no problem whatsoever, and the file system on the drive appeared to be perfectly intact until I finally obtained an enclosure for it today and connected it up to my laptop (also Windows 7) via USB, and found that Windows wanted me to format her system partition before use. Explorer displays no information about the size or free space of the partition, and Computer Management claims that the partition's nothing but RAW data, despite the fact that Ubuntu recognises the partition as NTFS, as does TestDisk running on Windows. The other partitions display correctly and are explore-able.
I can even access the contents of her drive via PartitionGuru on my laptop, and perform copy/paste operations from her hard drive to mine, although navigating her system partition is INCREDIBLY slow in comparison to the others.
If anyone has any ideas as to what may have gone wrong with the system partition and how I might fix it, I'd be grateful for any suggestions. Could it, for example, be a problem with the boot sector of the system partition, or with the Master Boot Record? I don't know how seriously a problem with either of those would cripple the HD's functioning. Windows never booted again after she turned the laptop off at the button during the startup sequence a couple of times one after the other, but then again, she only did so because it had already become increasingly unreliable, which makes me wonder if this isn't just her hard drive dying a bit of a slow death - but then why does it work perfectly in every respect except booting?