Windows Boot Screen Loop of Death
 

Right now, I have a laptop that is trying to bend me over a barrel. Windows 7 locked up last night and crashed at the profile login screen and I had to force it to shut down by cutting the power. When I tried rebooting it, it got stuck on the Windows 7 boot up screen and crashed. Now I'm dealing with the Windows 7 Error Recovery loop of death on start up and I'm trying to fix it without a repair disc and without losing my files and data on my harddrive. The "Repair Your Computer" function is stuck on a black screen with a cursor.

Any suggestions? The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L305D-S5974, the OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit.

is it trying to come out of hibernation?

No, actually. It happens when you simply turn the computer on.

Although that does remind me that the aforementioned profile login screen came up/locked up after bringing the laptop out of stand by mode.

I should also mention that it doesn't boot up completely even when using safe mode or any other option from the F8 boot option screen.

Willing to bet the hard drive has failed.

Run the toshiba hard drive DOS software from a boot CD, it'll scan for errors, you might just have bad sectors that are repairable. You will have to re-install windows if this is the case.

But it's probably toast.

Software Utilities

Pull the drive and put it in your PC. Remove all the files you need to remove. Step 2, reinstall the HD in the laptop and do a destructive recovery. Should be a BIOS option and a hidden restore partition to accomplish this.