Windows 7 - Cycle of restarts at "Windows is loading"

Hi guys, im having a total headache with this one on my wifes PC.

She is running windows 7, and it has been running perfectly until last night when the kid switched her pc off via the power button. Not sure if this is relevant but she had a 3d game runnign at the time also.

Since this, the PC will not boot up. It gets to the "windows is loading" screen, and then restarts at the point where it would usually go to desktop.
I tried to start in safe mode, but again the PC reboots itself after its loaded the windows files, where it would usually go to desktop.
Tried startup repair, again reboots after windows is loading files.

I then banged a windows disk in and booted from CD. It goes through loading all the windows files, then poof... a blue screen of death.
It had some built in HP checker...Memory test came ok, processor test ok, but hard drive didnt.
Has the hard drive been destroyed when the kiddo switched it off?
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Stu

Sounds like your hard drive is in trouble. Run the manufacturers diagnostics from the link below to make sure.

When i try to do this it says...

Cannot open CD driver MYDVD. SHCDX33E cannot load!
Disk C has label TURBODSK
your ram drive is loaded at C:
File not found. - 'L:\*.*'
Out of memory error.
Bad command or filename - "run.bat"

then it says SAMSUNG HDD UTILITY

C:\>

edit - i then loaded it to a usb floppy and managed to get B:\>ESTool.exe but then i got
Invalid Opcode at 000D 069C 0882 0000 0000 0000 0000 5756 63E8 8BFF 041E 8008 3B7F 7500
dos mem corrupt, first_mcb=0253
prev 068b:0000:4d 8c 06 09 0b 4d 59 44 45 53 54 4f 4f 4c 00 0d Mi...MYDESTOOL..
notMZ1195:0000:6e 01 ff ff 46 00 0d 00 9c 06 82 08 00 00 00 00 n. F...£.e.....

PANIC: MCB chain corrupted
System halted

the system then froze up here

That is something I have never seen before, you did burn the ISO image with an ISO burner on another PC?

And you did set the CD drive to 1st in the boot order?

Just confirm these two questions and we will go from there.

yeah at first i burned it to CD and booted from CD, but got the errors
then i put it on floppy, booted from floppy USB and got the above

both burned on my pc which im posting from

just did the ES Tool Samsung test.

READ DMA - PASS
CHECK S M A R T - PASS
SPIN DOWN/UP - PASS
SIMPLE SURFACE SCAN - DATA AM Not found
WRITE VERIFY - PASS
RANDOM SURFACE SCAN - PASS

it then asked if i want to scan the surface in more detail i said yes.....

READ SURFACE SCAN : Testing....
Error : LBA 16495
Error : LBA 16496
Error : LBA 16497
Error : LBA 16498
Error : LBA 16499
Error : LBA 16500
Error : LBA 16501
Error : LBA 16502

It looks like you downloaded the file for a floppy drive instead of the CD. But, never mind it has produced a result which means that you have bad blocks on the hard drive. This, in simple terms means the surface of the hard drive is worn out.

If you have any data on it that has not been backed up you could attach the drive to another PC, internally in a desktop or with a USB adapter for a laptop or desktop.

The only thing that may get it to work for a while is to run chkdsk /r from an elevated command prompt. This will make the system stop using the bad blocks but this may only be a temporary fix. To get to an elevated command prompt click Start, and type cmd in the search box, right click on cmd in the popup menu and select "Run as Administrator" then type the command:

chkdsk /r

You will then be asked if you want to run on next boot, answer yes and reboot. Chkdsk can take over an hour to run and may appear to have stopped at times, watch for the error reports.

After that you could try the Startup Repair again and it may come back to life. Bad blocks can be caused by corrupt data so you may be lucky and find that the drive recovers after using chkdsk. A full reinstall of the OS may be required.

I used Hirens Boot CD, and in that i used gpartition which let me delete the partition and make a new one. From here i was able to do a fresh install of windows.... so glad the drive was saved!

thanks for the help Mark

Glad to here you recovered the disc. Must have just corrupted an area of the disc when it was shut down, it shouldn't cause any further problems.

Any software that is installed on another partition will not usually work after this and will also have to be reinstalled.