HP Pavillion laptop won't boot...

taid · 17 Apr 2021

My grand-daughter has a HP Pavillion laptop which she brought over this morning as it is showing Recovery. It looks as if Windows has not loaded correctly”. It then gives a choice of “Restart my PC” or “See Advanced Repair Options. I’ve had a quick look through these and tried the restore option but it asks for a password, however when we input the password it says it’s not the correct password. I also tried to start it in safe mode and also in command prompt mode as I thought I could disable the screen where it asks for the password but – it won’t let me use either – ‘till I input the password! So I’m going around in circles. Assuming they’re available (without inputting a password…) I’m loth to try some of the other options as she has College work on the laptop which she is afraid of losing.

Very occasionally the laptop will boot to the password screen but then it does not recognise the password. On one occasion it has actually booted to the desktop, having taken a long time to get there but then failed shortly afterwards. I say fail as it did this when I was not in the room and it had returned to the ‘Windows has not loaded correctly’ screen or something similar.

I am not particularly computer literate so please be tolerant!

Thanks for any ideas…

dalchina · 17 Apr 2021

Hi, I'm going to guess- and I really hope you can say I'm wrong:

a. Your grand-daughter has no backups of her personal data e.g. on an external disk
b. She has not been using disk imaging as is so very very often recommended so she has both a full a backup and a means of restoring her PC to a previous good state relatively quickly.

Please say I'm wrong.

I'm also going to guess she needs this fixed yesterday.. time is critical. (That's why regular disk imaging is vital).

What can you do? Here's what I'd do:
a. Boot the PC from a live boot disk I have to hand and check the disk. Need to know if the disk has failed.
(iso files for live boot disks are freely downloadable- download one and create e.g. a bootable flash drive
from it - or even a DVD if the PC has such a drive).

b. Having booted from that live boot disk I'd aim to rescue important data assuming it's not backed up. That would allow her to continue work on another PC for example.

After that it's a matter of being very lucky. If the physical disk is ok, it depends what sort of corruption has occurred- and this is entirely unknown.

Has your grand-daughter been using a PIN and forgotten the password?
If the password is correct but is not being recognised, this suggests fundamental corruption.

Possibilities - and problems.
a. If your grand-daughter has ever enabled System Restore, try to run that, offline. Ah, but that will require a password to be accepted, and you say that isn't. Problem.

That would be the only way to restore the registry, if that's corrupt.

b. Create a Macrium Reflect bootable drive (free) and run the Fix Boot utility and see what that reports.

However, that does no more than try to get the boot sequence working- there's still the password problem.

I come back to the idea that rescuing the data and then clean installing Win 10 is likely the only way forward - and you might need a new disk.

SIW2 · 17 Apr 2021

If there are restore points , you should be able to get at them from booted media.
You can borrow my boot media 1904v2.iso
and extract the iso to usb with this Usb7ice.zip

You could see if it will allow a system restore via the link on the dektop of the boot media.

In your situation, for safety, I would probably mount a restore point (use nt6repair - link on the desktop) and make a wim image of it using dism++ to an external disk.

You can also run chkdsk and sfc from cmd prompt in the booted media.

After that you could see if anything can be done about the password. Under the start menu, you will find winntsetup >rt click at the top border>select windows installations

spunk · 17 Apr 2021

Try leaving the password field blank

Megahertz · 17 Apr 2021

It can be that the drive is dying or it is corrupted.

You can build the SIW2 WinPE tool or use a Win 10 installation drive to check the drive.
Boot from a Win 10 installation drive and on the first screen launch a CMD window by pressing Shift+F10.
Type:
diskpart
list volume (take note of the drive letter of the Windows partition. It may not be C:)
exit (to exit diskpart)
chkdsk x: /f (replace x with the drive letter from list volume)

Pay attention on the results, specially bad blocks, bad clusters, bad sectors etc

Report

As you have a desktop you can open the Laptop and take the drive out and attach to a SATA port on the desktop.
Then you run a chkdsk D: /f.
After the check disk, save her data on your drive. Copy D:\Users\Name to your drive

Jaylob4 · 17 Apr 2021

Is the HP Pavilion, one given by her school or college?

taid · 20 Apr 2021

Dalchina ->>> I'm going to guess - and I really hope you can say I'm wrong: <<<

Sadly you’re right, two years work – and no backups… Most of the stuff she’d already handed in but there’s still stuff on there that she doesn’t want to lose. Before I retired I worked in higher education for a long time and we were always telling students to make a point of obviously backing up on a regular basis. Sadly very few listened.

I ran fix boot from a Macrium Reflect usb pen like you suggested. It ‘appeared’ to be doing something – can’t remember the exact words but essentially it was replacing the BCD. I ran it a couple of times but sadly it didn’t help, the machine still wouldn’t boot.

I burnt a copy of SIW2’s boot media - 1904v2.iso – thank you SIW2 - which enabled me to gain access to the laptop’s C drive from which I copied the document folder onto an external USB pen so hopefully all is not lost.

I ran chkdsk /f /r /x and got the message ‘…Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems’ I tried to run sfc scannow and got the message ‘Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation’ I also tried to run DISM /online / cleanup-image /checkhealth and got the message ‘DISM does not support servicing Windows PE with the /online option’ Any ideas how I could make the later two run? I performed a system restore, this went on and on and on but eventually said it had completed successfully but sadly to no avail.

Running from an external USB pen is very flaky as is running from the DVD drive. Sometimes I may get the usual message ‘Press any key to boot from the CD’ message – then I get the usual blue and white error message to the effect that Windows has failed to start – the exact same thing as if I was trying to boot directly from the C drive. It may be necessary to attempt to boot from external media half a dozen times before it works…

Incidentally I did consider removing the hard drive and putting it in my desktop but that involves removing ~15 small screws and I’m partially sighted so I decided not to. If it was my own machine I’d probably have a go…

Oh and Jaylob4 – the machine is my grand daughter’s own machine – if fit belonged to the University I’d have told her to take it to their own IT people – then I could sleep at night!!!

Thanks to everyone who replied and my apology for the slow reply…

dalchina · 20 Apr 2021

This looks unfortunate.

You say you succeeded with System Restore, presumably run having booted the PC from a suitable live boot disk.

If that succeeded, you could try Macrium's Fix Boot again as the registry will have been replaced. It's always important to note the exact error message.

You should check the disk - e.g. using Crystal Diskinfo portable which will hopefully run having used a live boot disk- or there may be some such program provided on that. Some have them.

I think someone said Hard Disk Sentinel (portable) won't run using a live boot disk- excellent prog.
Very different check to chkdsk.

Here's one guide to using DISM offline:
How to Use DISM Offline Repair Windows 10?

Personally I think either:
- the disk is failing
- there's extensive corruption

and you will need to rescue what you can including program license codes, emails (if stored on an email client), favourites, contacts etc and clean install- if necessary on a new disk.

Best way to be sure you have a complete copy- either set that disk aside, or create a disk image of it - then you can always try to recover whatever you've forgotten later.

They say experience can be the best teacher....(!)

NavyLCDR · 20 Apr 2021

I would look at internal hard drive failure as well. I have seen many cases where a drive that has gone physically bad will cause all kinds of problems with any attempt at running any OS on the computer, even from a USB flash drive.

Jaylob4 · 20 Apr 2021

Oh and Jaylob4 – the machine is my grand daughter’s own machine – if fit belonged to the University I’d have told her to take it to their own IT people – then I could sleep at night!!!

Always the way, kids sleep, while parents/grandparents up till the early hours trying to help.

You hit the nail but skidded off the head, as your daughter does have an an IT department she can turn to, why not her give them a go.

HP Pavillion laptop won't boot...

HP Pavillion laptop won't boot...

HP Pavilion laptop won't boot...