Windows wont boot and Windows wont install

#1 Sunaj

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Posted 02 February 2012 - 10:35 AM

Hello, I've a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop which has Vista on it.

Windows will not boot past the main screen, it ends up restarting over and over.

I attempted to install Windows 7 on the drive without doing a clean install. The Installation hung at "Completing Installation"

I installed from a flash drive because for some reason this laptop wont install from the cd rom drive.

I need to salvage many important business related files from the laptop and don't want to do a clean install unless absolutely necessary.

Is it possible to salvage the files from this laptop? I cant boot into it, no safe mode, nor standard boot. Nor can I seem to be able to 'over write' or 'set aside' vista and install windows 7

Please Help

This post has been edited by hamluis: 02 February 2012 - 10:37 AM
Reason for edit: Moved from Win 7 to Vista.

#2 cryptodan

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Posted 02 February 2012 - 11:59 AM

You can put the drive into an external enclosure and try it that way.

Have you done any hardware diagnostics?

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#3 rotor123

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Posted 03 February 2012 - 05:53 PM

You can run diagnostics on this computer if you didn't damage the diagnostics partition with Win7.

Press F12 for the boot device menu when the Dell logo appears and choose Boot Diagnostics Partition. That has diagnostics for all the hardware available.

Good Luck

My first Computer had a Whopping 16K of memory @ 0.89MHz
My first hard drive held 20 Megabytes and never got filled up.

#4 mark1956

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Posted 03 February 2012 - 07:26 PM

You have learned the hard way how important it is to keep back ups of all your important data.

It sounds very likely that the hard drive is dying so I would remove it from the PC and get one of these USB hard drive adapter You can then connect it to any PC and extract the files.

Alternatively you could try this Ubuntu Live CD to back up files from your dead Windows