Win 7 not starting after Norton removal

Hi all,

I just deleted Norton 360 trial from a new hp pc. It asked me to reboot, and now hangs. As soon as it powers on it shows the boot selection screen for a portion of a second the just a blank screen with a cursor in the top corner. It will not accept any key presses, F8 etc to allow me to get to the recovery partition. Any suggestions?

Thanks
Bob

 

If you can access the desktop in safe mode using F8, Download and run the Norton Removal tool.

http://majorgeeks.com/Norton_Removal_Tool_SymNRT_d4749.html

 

Nope, cannot access any selection screens - recovery, safe mode etc. Does not appear to accept any keypresses.

 

If you press F8 and select repair, can you do a system restore.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/What-are-the-system-recovery-options-in-Windows-7#

 

Let me be clear. The pc will not accept any keypresses. I have tried all of the function keys during the startup and they do nothing. Literally what happens is that after about 6 seconds after I turn on power, the screen showing 'press f11 to start recovery, press f4 to to something else, etc' appears for about half a second then the screen goes blank, with just a flashing cursor.

 

Sorry, Missed that. Do you have the install DVD. This will let you get to the repair screen for a system restore.

 

Unfortunately not. It did not come with one. I can probably get hold of one fairly easily, but it will not be for a couple of days and I was hoping that there was another solution.

 

Other than that I do not know what can be done. Try here for the recovery disk. You have to burn the iso with Imgburn or something that can burn a bootable iso file. I would run an antivirus on this as I cannot vouch for this site.

Here are the legal full downloads for Windows 7.

 

OK, tried the recover disk and that gets me further. Attempted repair a few times and each time it states the same issue : Partition table does not have a valid system partition and that it has fixed it, but upon reboot it just goes back to the recovery.

It also does not come up with an OS in the box to select from, and says that I should install drivers for the hard disk.

Thoughts?

 

I would say that either the partition table or BCD is corrupted or both. The OS not coming up does not sound good. I would try to do a BCD repair but the OS not showing up prevents that I think. I am not that familiar with the BCD. sach2 has more experience with it. Hopefully he will jump in here with his thoughts. I do know that sometimes it takes maybe 4 or 5 attempts at startup repair before Windows decides to repair the mbr.

Edit: When you type Diskpart in a command window what does it say?

 

Sorry,
Should type Diskpart at the command prompt.

Then "list disk". What does it say?

 

Hi,

What happens now when you start the computer without the windows recovery environment disc? Do you get the blinking cursor or recovery options?

Starting from the disc when it says it can't find any Windows installations hit Next (instead of install Drivers) then choose Startup Repair from the list of 5 options. Let that run then restart from the disc and see if it now finds a Windows installation and offers to fix it, if it does let it try and then try to boot without the disc.

If no help we can go with diskpart to manually set an active partition.

EDIT: (One thing to do is to remove any USB devices such as external drives or flash drives to be certain they aren't interfering.)

 

OK, I removed a usb drive attached and win 7 stated it was performing a repair, then started normally. I have not had the stones to shut it down and restart it again, but did go ahead and burn some restore dvds. Fingers crossed the issue is solved. Thanks for the great help.

 

Hi,
My guess it was just trying to start from the USB drive for some reason. I think you should be fine restarting.

I'm glad you burned the recovery discs, just in case. If the various startup repairs did rewrite the MBR of the internal HD then you may have lost the factory restore function of F11. You might try hitting F11, sometime, during the boot process to see if it still takes you to recovery options for future reference. I think it will, because I believe Windows repair was attempting repairs on the external rather than the internal HD, but it would be useful for you to know for sure.