Windows 7 laptop won't boot

An elderly neighbour asked me to look at her laptop - suspect she thinks anyone under fifty must understand these things! Anyway, it's a bit bizarre -

It boots to a black screen with the mouse pointer visible and working. This comes after the "Starting Windows" message. It doesn't load Windows.

When I press F8 I get the "Repair windows" option. It reports there are no errors to be found.

It won't boot to safe mode either, stopping at the same stage, where the pointer is visible but nothing else.

It doesn't do anything different when I try and boot it to the last known good install.

The machine is an MSI CR640. It's running Windows 7.

Hope you can help!

 

This isn't a bump exactly but...

the same thing has happened to my notebook now.... :-o

I was rushing out to a meeting, powered the machine down and closed the lid and I suspect it was installing updates on a low battery so powered off before it completed.

Now it opens to a "Windows Error Recovery" screen, offering me "Launch Start Up Repair" and "Start Windows Normally". Selecting either causes it to cycle back to the same window. No specific error message, just a screen comes up saying "loading files" for a few moments, then back to "Windows Error Recovery".

I've tried to boot in safe mode - same result. Tried to load last good configuration - same. In fact, everything on the F8 menu just cycles me back to "Windows Error Recovery".

Do I need to reinstall Windows 7? ANd do so from a separate hard drive since my notebook doesn't have a cd drive?

Thanks in advance.

ETA it's a 32 bit Dell Inspiron 1090 running W7.

 

To the elderly neighbor thing: How long did you wait for the GUI to appear before rebooting? I've had a few machines I worked on take almost 10 minutes to even show a login screen. Of course, I backed up the data, scanned it all, and reinstalled. You may want to do the same.

To the post that isn't a bump: Does the "Starting Windows" screen appear? If not, you might have a boot loader problem. I'll give you the link if you need it.

 

Hi Mousepad, thanks for getting back

I bit the bullet and took both machines along to my local repair shop. I'm wondering if in my machines case it might have been the install of AVG2014 that caused the system instability - AVG's acting up since I got it repaired.

re the elderly neighbour - her machine would sit on all night without booting.

So I guess - case closed - though if I get a report back from the engineers I'll pass it on.