A Vista laptop is having trouble starting up. The black boot up screen appears and the scrolling bar appears for a a few moments then the screen goes blank and all hard disk activity appears to cease. I experienced something similar a week or two ago on a neighbours laptop and, on that laptop, it turned out that some updates were simply taking a long time to install and waiting was the answer. However, this laptop has been left overnight and the screen is still blank the following day (more than 8 hours later).

The F8 screen loads ok but again the same inactivity happens when the “Last Known Good Configuration” option is selected. I have also tried rolling the machine back using System Restore (by booting from the disc) however it gets as far as the blue screen with the “Please wait…” message then hard disk activity stops and nothing happens - this has been left overnight too.

Even a complete re-installation fails with a message saying disk errors have been found and a complete scan is required - the scan simply sits on an inactive screen.

The odd thing is that the machine passes all of the laptop hardware diagnostic tests including hard drive, memory, and processor tests.

I have a few more ideas to try this afternoon and will post my findings here.

UPDATE: 30th July 07:50
Safe mode stops at crcdisk.sys - I disabled all of the extra hardware in the BIOS in case it was a driver issue and even left it overnight but the same problem is present. A new option has appeared on the F8 screen ‘reset to manufacturer factory settings.” - this requires a reformat of the hard drive - which seems like a reasonable idea. However, ten hours later it still thinks it is reformatting the hard drive.

UPDATE: 31st July 08:15
We phoned the manufacturer support desk to try and get the machine repaired but they advised us to remove the back of the laptop that contains the hard drive in order to detach the hard drive frrom the unit. As the owner of the machine was reluctant to do this with warranty concerns the support desk told us they could not help any further. As the machine was only 27 days old it was returned to the shop where it was purchased who was only too happy to replace it for another machine.

This was a very strange fault especially as the machine seemingly passed all of its hardware tests and even a reformat wouldn’t fix it. I guess you win some … you lose some.