Need help with Win 7 laptop

[elsiegee40]

Please excuse me for asking daft questions, but this is my teenage son's laptop and I've had very little experience of Win 7, especially if goes wrong. I'm always terrified when our own kit goes wrong; somehow it's easier at school where you can just re-image.

I need advice on the best way to proceed with this... I really need someone to hold my hand a bit

Basically it takes an age to boot ... never really finishing. All sorts of things are falling over as it goes and this is painfully slow. Its's unusable.

I am trying to boot it into Safe Mode. It goes through a whole stream of Loaded: messages and then appears to hang after
Loaded: \Windows\system32\DRIVERS\amdkmdfd.sys

Son says it will get into Safe Mode eventually, but I'm still waiting as I type this. According to him "nothing works". If you click on anything you get
"The instruction at 0x000007FEF798EC94 referenced memory at 0x000007FEF98EC94. The required data was not placed into memory because of an I/O error status of 0xc00000b5." and then click on enter to terminate program.

I have a repair disk created when the laptop was first purchased (July last year) and a set of Recovery Disks created at the same time.

Help! Please?!

[sted]

if it gets into safe mode might be worth trying system restore or ram check or hdd diags

[elsiegee40]

If.. I'm still waiting

[SYNACK]

Make a bootable CD of memtest86+ Memtest86 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and give that a crack to test the RAM, boot with a live CD and recover the data to a different drive then run a full scandisk and vendor utility scan on the HD (ie seatools for Seagate).

AMD stuff could be anything, I know that many vendors messed originally with Vista when the images with a Universal image that had intel drivers in it which were not sanitised out, this worked fine till SP1 which showed up the fault and wrecked all the installs in those batches. Depending on the computer something similar could have happened. A repair install after all the above steps is probably the best bet (in the case of Vista+ I think this is referred to as an inplace upgrade even if there is not version change).

[elsiegee40]

So this is more likely to be hardware related that malware @SYNACK?

MemTest currently running

[witch]

Why not try the recovery disk? I have done so before and it has worked well. Is there data on there that he wants? If so and you can't get it going, what I do is either put the hd in a different laptop or buy a SATA drive cage (few quid on ebay) and hang it off another computer via USB. Unless things are really bad you can usually see the files and get them off. Then use the recovery disks.

*hang on - it's less than a year old - does it have a warranty and a tech support line??

[elsiegee40]

It's under warranty, but I need to prove it's not malware or software causing the problem before sending it back.

He says he backed the data up a week ago, so the data isn't critical.

[witch]

How do you "prove" that other than run malwarebytes, combofix,antivirus and the rest. And you can't do that if you can't get it going, can you! If it won't start,what can you do?
I don't see how they can hold you to that unless they give you instructions about what they want checked before you send it back. After all, you could be completely un computer literate.
Sounds hardware related to me. So if you follow Synack's instructions and then use the recovery disk, that should give you an answer.

Do you have another laptop that would take the HD? That'll tell you if it is the hard drive pretty fast. It wont like a new machine - different drivers and the like but it should at least boot properly if it is OK

[elsiegee40]

No there's nothing that will take the HDD. Memtest86+ is currently 73% through with no errors so far.

If that's clean, I'll try the repair disk and see if that turns anything up.

EDIT
Or would I be better off going straight to the recovery disks?

[witch]

Good Luck

[Cy3rtch]

Excuse me for asking what kind of laptop ie make and model.

[elsiegee40]

Excuse me for asking what kind of laptop ie make and model.

Dell inspiron 15RSE7520

[witch]

I'm surprised you have to send it back Two of my children have Dells and the standard warranty was that they came out to fix it. I know this because they had to come out for both laptops within the year.

[Cy3rtch]

Have you tried just reinstalling Win7

[Cy3rtch]

Or try booting to win normally and run SFC / scannow