Vista Laptop Not Booting - Again! (Part 2)

CONTINUING SAGA...

As I was telling you earlier, I managed after a few attempts to get my laptop to boot and work just fine from the state of turning itself on, blinking and disk spinning, then turning itself off again! That was really weird. I also told you I did not run a disk check!

THE NEXT MORNING, A RUDE AWAKENING


The next morning I was up for a rude awakening. Previous night I left the  laptop in the hibernate mode. I pressed the on button and, darn, it got even worse than last night! This time, the "on" light, and the "caps lock" light, and the "numeric lock" light came on, but not the disk light, and there was NO SOUND from the disk either! Wow. It got even worse than last night! The computer is not booting up! What to do?

COMPUTER WILL NOT BOOT, SHOWS BLANK SCREEN, NO DISK LIGHT

This time, computer did not get turned off by itself. It just stayed on, and on, and on, with the blank screen and disk not making any noises. Just silence. That was terrible. Luckily, I knew from past experience about laptop not booting and showing blank screen that patience helps and that I needed to wait until I hear the fan come on and I may be able to fix the computer not booting. Or so I hoped.

A HALF HOUR LATER, THE FAN!

It took over a half an hour before the sound of the fan announced something has changed. The DVD player ( with no DVD inserted ) started to do its light show with the DVD light. Best of all, the hard disk light came on! I pushed the DVD eject button and the tray did come out. So that's different. A positive change. What next? I turn the computer off and back on, still nothing, this Vista is not booting up.

IF YOU HEAR A CLICKING SOUND FROM A HARD DISK...

I keep it on and, lo and behold, 3 minutes later, the hard disk light and the sound of the hard disk came on. That was good as a sign of life, however the sound of the hard disk was like a click. That can not be good.


BACK IN THE SAME GAME OF TURN OFF TURN ON

In fact, I got back to the game reported earlier, computer shutting itself off, by itself! Then back on, just like last night! The DVD light was blinking, even though the tray was out. Wow. The F8 didn't help this time. Weird! Now, the computer turned itself off just about once a minute. Then right back on! I just let it be. Just let it be.

PATIENCE HELPS, AGAIN

Remarkably, after about one long hour of waiting, the laptop came back up, took up the hibernate file, and restored the Vista as if nothing happened in the last couple of hours! Quite amazing. Yet, not quite unexpected as such miraculous healings of my laptop occurred previously, just about a month ago. As you may remember back then computer wouldn't boot after I turned the computer off during a disk check!

LAPTOP IS BACK UP, WORKING FLAWLESSLY

After giving thanks to the lord of miracles, I immediately executed disk checks of both my C: drive and the D: drive.  The checks showed nothing wrong. So far my computer is running flawlessly. Just another day in the la-la land of laptop happenings and just another simple yet exciting and quite miraculous resurrection of an almost dead computer.

WHAT ABOUT YOUR COMPUTER?

What about you? Did you have similar symptoms with your computer? I'd love to hear from you. Did the story above help you solve your "windows computer not booting" problem? As simple as it may be, it may not be the obvious choice of trying to solve the problem. As one of the younger commentators says, they TRIED EVERYTHING to get his laptop to boot ( and he really needs it as it's hard to NOT play a video game after playing for five years, pretty much daily ). And his mom won't call the HP as the laptop is out of warranty! This example, and others, show that instead of trying EVERYTHING, sometimes you must do almost NOTHING instead. To solve this problem I just listened to what was happening with the machine and allowed the computer to come back up. All I did was patiently wait. Hardly the stuff video games are made of. Let me know if  you had similar symptoms and if this story helped you get your computer to boot! Just leave me a comment below, either way!

P.S.: Although I trust miracles will happen again and my laptop will be safe, I'm diving into the land of backups. I am starting to be serious about making backups. More later!

RELATED POSTS

Part One of This Post - Computer Not Booting, Turns Itself Off And On

Vista or Windows 7 Computer Will Not Resume From Sleep, Suspend or Hibernate

An excellent guide to POST (power on self test) and cleaning your computer to prevent boot problems

16 comments:

chris said...

I posted my experience on Dani web and on my site at:
http://innovationsdesign.net/wb_2.7/pages/posts/hp-laptop-startup-problem-bypass22.php

I didn't notice what kind of laptop you were using but mine is an HP and they have had a lot of these problems. My problems started when the machine would not recover from Hibernate. I eventually managed to get it started and now I leave it running 7/24 and reboot once every week or two. If it is hot, it will normally reboot. If I let it go cold, more often than not it goes into the startup loop where Post doesn't complete. I am able to get it out of the loop with a bypass that works for me but so far, not for anyone else. If you have had this sort of problem, chances are pretty good that there is a fault somewhere and it will happen again (unless you have replaced something or re-seated something that was causing the problem.

Chris

Matt said...

Chris, These are really good points you are making. What could make the machine want to boot only when it is heated up? I'll let you know if I ever have problems booting a cold machine. Cheers and thanx again!

Anonymous said...

I have the same issue, HP DV9000 laptop. Experienced the same hibernation issues for a couple of weeks, concerned about data did a backup and disk checks, no issues. 3 days ago turned it on, worked for about an hour then screen went blank. Tried to reboot and now just a blank screen, cycles through, power lites come on, HD spins, CD spins, fan turns on then everything powers off and starts all over again. Tried with Vista boot disc and still nothing. Tried F8, F12, pulled battery and power cable pressed on button for 60 seconds. Re-seated both ram and HD. Nothing seems to change. Looking for any help. William

Disclosure said...

I think you should do a disk check the first chance you get. Otherwise, glad you had a backup.

Anonymous said...

I have a Gateway and I was leaving it on 24/7. One day i was on it and it just shut down on its own. ever since then I've had problems getting it to boot back up. Every now and then I can get it to boot, but it just either shuts down again or when i shut it off I go through the same problem again. What its doing is when I hit the power i get the first set of lights on then (in a successful boot up) I'll get a second flash, then it'll boot. Lately, it's been giving me the first flash of lights then blank screen and nothing. I have tried to leave it on and wait but after an HR I still got nothing. I'm out of ideas I was thinking that something went bad, but if that's the case it wouldn't start up at all, right? So I don't know what else to do. I'm lost and I tried everything that William above me tried. I'll take any ideas. Thanks, Steve

doc k said...

similar problem here, except my laptop is from a private computer guy.......the word vista shows up on my screen, after about a half hour warm up after i hit f8 for safe mode.......i think i got a virus as i was definitely surfing unsafe before this happened.....yet never had the prob before......been out of usa, on military stuff so it was fun to surf, if you know what i mean.....

doc k said...

some progress: after many f8 to safe mode attempts, i actually got to "last known good configuration".......i got hope

Matt @ Annoyances-Resolved said...

Great, your story doc k is beginning to look a lot like the original poster.. Keep trying. Keep everyone posted, thanks!

doc k said...

i had noticed an update for vista had not downloaded correctly whilst i surfed. reading elsewhere, others have reported problems with vista updates........ha!....my buddy who swears by apple would just laugh.......yet i've had vista since its inception, and no probs except intial authentication stuff

doc k said...

Really like your stuff Matt. I will turn my fix it guy on to your pages. Right now, I'm showing the vista emblem and then it fades into a pronged slash mark with colors. looks like a generic screen saver.......screen is black not blue....

Disclosure said...

Hi Doc K. Thanks for your endorsement!

sikesonrich said...

hi pls i've worked through many of these solution but no one work out for me. pls i need one who can help me out of this problem am into, this is a hp compaq presario v6000, i've even tried to remove the ac plug and battery and hold press the power button for a minute, and plug back the ac plug and insert the battery back yet the problem persist, the laptop continues to reboot it's self within the black microsoft corporation running screen and offing itself and Oning repeatedly.
pls any more means should help me out on this either through this e-mail: sikesonrich@yahoo.com or sikesonrich@gmail.com i'll be grateful if You can help me out.
Awaiting for your GODLY act pls save me out of this problem.

Thanks in anticipation
and remain blessed

Disclosure said...

sikesonrich, you write about all the many things you have tried, but you DID NOT say whether you have followed exactly the steps described in THIS POST. So let us know, and let us know if it worked for you too! Thanks for sharing!

Joshua Hardin said...

I'm assuming this is practically a dead post, however I recently come across something I would like to add. I, myself am a computer repair guy. This is what I do for a living since I practically fell outta my momma and onto a computer keyboard :) I was literally a "42 year old doctor, with a house in malibu, a porche 911, and a multi million dollar house that was paid for" when I was 5 years old! lol But that's for another day...

With my computer knowledge I like to help family and friends out with their pc issues whenever I can. My buddy's girlfriend has a Compaq Presario CQ50, with Vista Home Premium 32 bit that has just been giving them fits. This computer has never been maintained via defrag, disk check, or safe browsing. In fact it had a horrible virus on it, the likes of which I have never seen.. First virus that I have ever come across that had Windows asking you what program to use to open an EXE file..

Naturally I don't have a copy of the Vista disc, nor did they. So I download an ISO of it and reinstall.. I was able to get Windows some what functioning again. Until I rebooted the computer for about the 5th time, then the real trouble began!

Now I am having the same black screen error described above. However, to take it even a step further, now the computer won't recognize the burnt Vista disc in order to boot from it. So I convinced them to let me downgrade them to XP, which I have the OEM disc for. They agreed, now when I change boot menu to boot from disc, it sees it, says "press any key to boot from disc" but then will literally go black screen for a good 15-30 mins.

When setup loads, I deleted the partitions to just format and reinstall. However, if I try to do the full format instead of Quick format, the hard drive light stays on but the % never leaves 0. So I rebooted and chose the quick format and it starts formatting as if there was no problem.. Does this make any sense to any of you? Because I am about to say something that I very very rarely say... I'm lost!

First time I have ever ran into a problem on a computer that I couldn't figure out how to fix. The only thing I can think of is that the HD is either going dead (however still works np, but haven't had chance to run disk check) or something else hardware related is causing a problem...

Any ideas please email me asap, J_Hardin25@comcast.net

Disclosure said...

Hi Joshua, Thanks for your post.
No, it is not a dead post. No posts on this blog are dead.

However, I had trouble getting my comments posted on blogger, so I'm late with my reply.

Very interesting case you have on your hands there, huh?

You seem to have everything under control though. Well at least you know exactly what your next step is in troubleshooting your relatives computer.

Let us know what you found out!

Dr Jaishree Jain said...

Good story! i have enjoyed it very much.

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