elsiegee40 Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 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 Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 if it gets into safe mode might be worth trying system restore or ram check or hdd diags 1
SYNACK Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 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). 1
elsiegee40 Posted March 23, 2013 Author Posted March 23, 2013 (edited) So this is more likely to be hardware related that malware @SYNACK? MemTest currently running Edited March 23, 2013 by elsiegee40
witch Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 (edited) 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?? Edited March 23, 2013 by witch 1
elsiegee40 Posted March 23, 2013 Author Posted March 23, 2013 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 Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 (edited) 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 Edited March 23, 2013 by witch
elsiegee40 Posted March 23, 2013 Author Posted March 23, 2013 (edited) 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? Edited March 23, 2013 by elsiegee40
Cy3rtch Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 Excuse me for asking what kind of laptop ie make and model.
elsiegee40 Posted March 23, 2013 Author Posted March 23, 2013 Excuse me for asking what kind of laptop ie make and model. Dell inspiron 15RSE7520
witch Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 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 Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 Or try booting to win normally and run SFC / scannow
Cy3rtch Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/system_file_checker.mspx?mfr=true
elsiegee40 Posted March 23, 2013 Author Posted March 23, 2013 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. TBH I haven't checked that at the moment. I'm trying to do too many things at once. The eldest has had various, mostly self inflicted problems, trying to get home from uni that I've been dealing with by text and at the same time I have teenage son stressing about AS work he can't do without his laptop... He got Solidworks via school and we don't have the CD and Adobe CS only has the one license, so I can't evn install them on my machine.
SYNACK Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 So this is more likely to be hardware related that malware @SYNACK? MemTest currently running It could be hardware and checking that first is a good start and means you start with a good platform. If you have recovery disks and can back up the whole user profile/docs a recovery plus restore and reinstall of whatever required software is probably the quickest way to a fresh system assuming it passes hardware tests and you can't just warrenty it. 1
elsiegee40 Posted March 23, 2013 Author Posted March 23, 2013 MemTest86+ just finished. Nothing found Currently running CHKDSK
elsiegee40 Posted March 23, 2013 Author Posted March 23, 2013 Interesting.... CHKDSK started automatically as it rebooted from MemTest86+ and is now Identfying File record segments as unreadable. I think we have an HDD problem here.
Cy3rtch Posted March 23, 2013 Posted March 23, 2013 If you need adobe just go here http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html u have all the adobe cs2... Take the hard drive out if the laptop and plug it into another PC via USB. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?MfrId=0&CatId=3770. And save all the files on the HDD and then put it back into the laptop and reinstall Win7. Also what you can do is plug it into another PC and run a sfc / scannow on that HDD with sfc /scannow you can repair or it not it will let you know if its damaged 1
elsiegee40 Posted March 23, 2013 Author Posted March 23, 2013 This one's going straight to Dell when their service desk opens on Monday. It has next business day collect and return, so they can sort out the HDD. I'm just relieved the disk finally showed its true colours, so I know where I stand.
DaveCoop Posted March 25, 2013 Posted March 25, 2013 If data is not an issue have a look at this thread How to Start Up the Dell Inspiron Recovery Partition | eHow.com I would personally take it right back to factory settings if it crashes after that send it back its not worth wasting your time on. First I would check your backup and copy the HDD to another computer just in case and then full recover the unit. hope that helps
elsiegee40 Posted March 25, 2013 Author Posted March 25, 2013 It's under warranty and I've just called Dell; someone is coming out tomorrow to replace the HDD.
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