My 1340 suddenly won't boot... help please.

Aside from randomly freezing here and there (which i've learned to accept after bringing it to the techs a few times and it couldn't be replicated), my 1340 just won't boot now. I've tried following the prompts to see if it could repair itself and then tried using the Windows 7 disk to repair without success. My warranty has just expired and this is the first time i'm seeing this.

I've attached the two screens i'm getting below.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.



Nothing has been recently installed or attached.

 

If it's not just a corrupt OS, then I'd say it might be a bad hard drive. Try reinstalling... and failing that, reinstalling on a known good HDD?

 

Thats the same error type of error I got when my 8600 GS died on my HP laptop. Run the Dell diagnostics on your HDD and your RAM, if they check out ok it's likely your GPU is toast.

 

So I had my IT guys at work take a look, and after running a Hard drive test that took over 24 hours straight and a memory test they could not find any errors. They concluded it was a software issue.


Today I started the reformat and reinstall route and everything seemed OK. In the midst of starting to update my dell drivers, same issue popped up in the middle of one upgrade that required a re-start.

Can't boot again. Back to square one on this... any more suggestions?

 

Do you happen to have Windows 7 64-bit and AVG? AVG released an update on December 1st (the day before your first post), which caused 64-bit editions of Windows 7 to not boot up. If this sounds like something you have, somehow access your file system and delete your AVG folder under Program Files and it should clear up your issues. Fortunately, I was able to access my Windows partition through Ubuntu. You could try a live cd to do the same if you haven't configured your system to dual boot. I had the same issue you were having and the above is what AVG customer support told me to do.

You can also take a look at AVG's solution http://www.avg.com/ww-en/faq.num-4079

 

Trust me, i'm almost positive your video card just died. Everything you've described is exactly the same as what happened when mine was fried including not being able to reinstall windows. When you get to the part where it tries to install the video drivers it checks the hardware and gives you the error. You'll never get past that part of the reinstall no matter how many tries you make. I'd reccomend looking into finding someone who can reflow your Nvidia gpu. That's your cheapest fix if it works. I took mine in to diagnose that in fact my gpu was at fault which cost $50 and had the reflow done for $115. Still way cheaper than a new mobo at $500.

 

I do use 64 and AVG!.... the link above describes a BSOD, and I'm not sure if that's literally a blue screen of death or simply a hangup like I've had but that might have been it... I've reformatted so I suppose I'll never know... Everything seems to be working again, but the pain of reformatting is killing me. 2 days so far and I think I've gotten everything back except itunes, which I forgot to backup before doing the reformat. I'm running dell diagnostics to see if there's any potential hardware problems and it's popped up a bunch of error messages with what I thought was the the wifi and bluetooth diagnostics, like this:


Googling the error code didn't help me and Wifi and Bluetooth do actually appear to function without issues however.

Video drivers installed OK i believe and I don't seem to be having any actual video output issues. I hope it's not a GPU issue like yours. I'd scrap this if it was.


There's nothing worse than a computer you can't trust. I'm torn between using this until it's actually physically unusable (actual obvious hardware failure) and potentially losing valuable data or buying a new laptop after having this one for just over a year.

Thanks for all the help everyone, I'll keep you updated with any other problems I might have.

 

I'm glad that you can boot up again. AVG is definitely at fault if the last thing you remember was applying their December 1st update for AVG 2011. I had the same symptoms but a really brief BSOD (which lasted less than a second), then my system would just restart the boot manager. I'm not sure if a BSOD occur on older versions of AVG.

Unfortunately, I believe there are many who suffered the same issue but did not have the information as to what caused the problem. For me, startup repair failed to correct the problem and also the os wouldn't let me boot into safe mode.

Hopefully you fared off better than me. I had the same symptoms days before my final exams.

 

Just a heads up that I've been running my re-formatted laptop for a few weeks now with no problems...