so went to fire up my laptop this morning and it literally takes forever to load up windows. thought thats odd, maybe i need to disable some program that might be hogging resources at boot. went into msconfig and nothing unusual, so i disabled a few programs i knew i dont need booting up. restart and boom same thing. taking forever. after a few shutdowns/reboots at one point this computer while booting up takes me into a startup problem fixer and says my computer cant startup, its going to check for problems. i do that, restart when its finished, again still taking forever. so i let it sit and boot up, finally get on, and i see some error message about failing to connect to windows service. so i do a google search and looks like others had same problem with slow boot up times and this error message. i tried this solution: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/169-63-failed-connect-windows-service 1.Boot ur computer in safe mode windows 7 2. Default GUI screen will be displayed 3.Click on Start button. 4. Type Cmd in the Start Search text box. 5. Right click on cmd.exe and Run Command Prompt as an Administrator. Allow elevation request. 6. Type netsh winsock reset in the Command Prompt shell, and then press the Enter key. Restart the computer. still didnt work. anyone have any ideas what might be going on? i have no idea what i could have done. computer worked fine yesterday. thanks for any help
Anything interesting in the event logs? What about booting into safe mode...does that also take a while and generate the error? I'd also check the services and see if any are set to automatic and failed to start.
if your computer worked yesterday try doing a system restore in safe mode. If anything buggered up your registry then it will restore it to a another point where stuff was working correctly. It's saved my butt a few times. Hopefully your windows has it enabled. Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System Restore/pick a restore point in the recent past/let it do it's thing and reboot
not sure how to check event logs,,,but yeah when i went to try the fix i posted booting into safe mode did take awhile i'll try this and report back. thanks
wow just went to boot up and got the whole "your computer was unable to start dialog again..wtf so that startup repair tool did nothing. now for some reason i cant even boot into safe mode. just tried gotta hold down an F key at bootup and the thing started beeping while i was holding it down
alright, well somehow i got it to mange to pop up the options to run safe mode, safe mode w/networking etc... one of the options was basically a reformat to factory settings. i just went ahead and did that. figured tired of messing with everything. so now everything is working
yeah, no biggie though. nothing i can't just re download. didnt have a bunch of documents or music on it. i store all that stuff on an external drive
If you have not done so, unplug ALL periferels, mouse, keyboard etc and see if is still occurring. If it boots normally slowly start plugging everything back in.
That's my impression as well. Sounds like your hard drive is toast. Good news: you've already scrubbed the drive, so installing a new one should be easy and relatively painless.
Eh, his HDD is not toast. Just something got corrupted in his Windows 7. Should have either done a Repair or System Restore. Reformatting/reinstalling is the last thing if all fail.