Windows 7 is stuck at "Starting Windows" when I attempt to boot computer

Solution 1:

To detect the source of the problem and to avoid re-installing Windows on faulty hardware, you could test your hardware for potential malfunctions.

For this purpose, download and burn a recovery/diagnostics CD. I personally prefer Hiren's BootCD Here is the download page.

Boot from that CD and try running basic tests, like Memtest86+, which is for RAM, and MHDD, which is for hard drives and can detect bad sectors on your HDD. Notice the tool named Remove Non Present Drivers. Do some preparatory research on the tool you are going to use, be as careful as possible.

Hiren's BootCD offers a number of anti-virus and recovery tools as well. It also includes a Mini Windows XP that you could use to browse files, for example, to see whether renaming a questionable driver so that your Windows doesn't load it on next boot makes any difference, and backup files to a USB stick.

Before getting into troubleshooting, disconnect as many devices as you can. If your motherboard has built-in graphics support, unplug your graphics card and switch your display to the motherboard's video output instead.

Hope you find it helpful.

Solution 2:

I'll tell you now, it's not hardware. Forget the motherboard being at fault, it almost certainly isn't. Other OS's work fine, that tells you the hardware is ok.

This is undoubtedly a corrupt install of windows caused by a few bad blocks. This can be windows own fault, not the hardware itself.

What you really need to do is get into the recovery console of windows 7 again, open the command prompt, and run 'chkdsk C: /r' (the drive letter of C: may have changed as you're booting outside of windows, but it should be ok as recovery console usually uses X: as its default root directory. This can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 4 hours or more to run depending on the size and speed of the hard drive (empty blocks will also be checked.)

You can also try SFC /SCANNOW but I don't know how this works in the recovery console (I've only ever needed it in a desktop environment). It checks the integrity of windows system files and requests to replace as necessary.

This will check your partition extensively. See http://pcsupport.about.com/od/termsc/p/chkdsk.htm

Source: 4.5 years desktop and server support experience covering 70 companies running anything from windows 98 to windows 7.

Solution 3:

I noticed eubakup.sys and EUBKMON.SYS which aren't "standard" Windows drivers. You may try booting into your system with a Windows PE disk and renaming those files so the drivers don't load on next boot and see where you get.

The only time I've really experienced this issue is when the jumpers on my IDE drives (I put Windows 7 on an old P4 as an experiment) were set to cable select. If your USB and network card issues on the Ubuntu live CD are intermittent in nature I'd say your motherboard is kicking the bucket.

Solution 4:

You don't mention exactly what tests you have performed on the drive, but based on your symptoms, this could very well be caused by bad sectors on your drive. Especially if you didn't mess around with hardware or drivers just before the problem occured.

Try running a disk test that reads the whole disk, byte by byte. Various forms of 'quick tests' might not hit the area with the bad sectors. A SMART test might not even report any problems.

Using a test tool that reports or graphs the results in a way that makes it easy to spot areas taking unreasonably long to be read is a must. Not all tools do this.