I'm looking for help and apologizing in advance for the length of this post, but I want to be as thorough as possible.
My daughter called me last week telling me that her WIN7 PC was refusing to boot-up. Since she was coming here this past Wednesday (she lives 110 miles from my house), I told her to bring the PC with her so I could trouble-shoot it.
The PC: in 2010 I built the following for her.
Antec Sonata III w/500W Antec PSU
Intel BOXDG41MJ Mini ITX MB w/stock heatsink/fan and using onboard GPU, Sound and NIC
Intel E5400 CPU
Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 800 RAM
WD Blue 250GB HDD
Lite-on DVD R/RW optical drive
Added an Antec 120mm fan for input from the front to go along with the existing 120mm output fan
Installed a retail boxed copy of WIN7 Home Premium 32bit. Also installed MSE and Malwarebytes.
When she last ran MSE and Malwarebytes a week or so ago, both showed nothing found.
In BIOS, the PSU voltages are all normal, and the CPU temp is normal.
After opening up the case and vacuuming it out - wasn't really that dirty - and unplugging and reseating all the connectors and the 2 sticks of RAM, I got the PC hooked up and turned on and the BIOS screen flashed up then went to the "Windows Error Recovery" screen and gave the Launch Startup Repair (Recommended) and Start Windows normally choices. I chose Repair, and the screen turns black with loading files and then a black screen comes on showing Microsoft Corporation with a bar above it. I have left it sitting for a couple of hours, but nothing happens. The HDD activity LED stays dark. I then tried Start Windows normally which goes to the "Starting Windows" screen with the 4 colored dots. After a few seconds the dots freeze but the PC fails to boot. Again, it stayed locked up even after a couple of hours and the disk activity LED stays dark.
I've also hit F8 to get into Advanced Boot Options, and then tired Safe mode with or without networking or with command prompt and each one hangs at Windows\system32\drivers\CLASSPNP.SYS
Start last known good also hangs at the starting Windows screen.
I've run MEMTEST from a bootable CD and had no errors after running for 7 or 8 hours. I also downloaded Western Digital's disk error checking program and booted it from a memory stick. The WD program shows no errors on the quick test or deep scan test.
I pulled the HDD and used a USB SATA adapter to plug it into my PC. All 3 partitions show up normally. I created a DATA partition on the HDD when I set-up the PC where she saves everything, and opened several pictures, played some MP3's and opened a couple MS Office docs and all worked fine. I then copied everything on the partition to a folder on one of my HDDs.
So, I think I've eliminated any hardware issues, and have exhausted any other trouble-shooting procedures that I know how to do.
I have her copy of the WIN7 DVD, so if this is an unsolvable issue, I can do a nuke/pave clean install to get the O/S back working. She'll have to install her other software when she gets the PC back home. But, I would choose this path as a last resort if the problem is unsolvable.
Any help or advise would be greatly appreciated.
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Mac
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