Windows won't boot, black screen

I have been using windows 7 for a few weeks with no issues. Well no big issues.

I suddenly got a bluescreen while browsing and the computer completely locked up, sound card was screaming away with a high pitched noise. I had to push the power button to turn it off. Now when I boot Win7, it shows me the "Previous Version" menu but when I select Win7 (instead of WinXP) it goes to a blank screen. I let it sit there for over an hour and it never booted, the hard drive light never lit, nothing. I tried hooking to an external monitor, turning on the acer and quickly slamming the lid closed like I used to do with older laptops that had cruddy small screens to force it to switch to an external monitor and higher resolution, to see if it was trying to do the new fancy boot screen and breaking but I get the same black screen.

Any idea's? I don't even understand how window7 handles the boot menu. It doesn't seem to use boot.ini anymore.

WindowsXP is working BTW.

 

Boot from a USB stick to another OS, for instance Puppy Linux and use gparted to check the partitions. Maybe you can recover it by fiddling out the correct partitioning or recreating a boot sector.

 

The MBR bootsector is now executing the boot loader on the Windows 7 partition. If you want to abandon Win7 you can use the XP repair/recovery process on the XP install CD to do a fixmbr. This will restore the XP boot loader (boot.ini).

Sounds like your Win7 installation is screwed. Is there a repair/recovery mechanism in the Win7 installation image that you could try?

 

I'm working on getting a copy of win7 and a USB drive today. May not happen. I did however get into windowsXP manually and found a "Found.000" folder on my windows7 partition that has most of my System32 folder in it. So it was a pretty nasty crash.

I'm restoring the files over but I'm missing some common players like that ntoskrnl.exe or however it's spelled.

 

Daft as it may sound, you can boot into XP, copy the Win7 installation files to your XP partition and the run the Win7 installer from there (from XP).

Hopefully the Win7 installer will then recognize the existing installation and offer to repair it for you.

You should perform a full filesystem check on the Win7 partition at the earliest opportunity.

 

I booted to WinXP but was unable to get files extracted from the install cd. It's all weirdly packaged up. Couldn't do a repair with the Win7 install so I had to reinstall. It copied the User/Windows/Program Files directory to Windows.old so I didn't lose any files but I had to reinstall EVERYTHING. Major pain. It's working now though.

Thanks all for the help.