Laptop troubleshooting forum: Gateway laptop won't boot

Bob, thank for the comments.

I agree, "Either the restore media will work or it won't..." I will find that out when / if my friend find the disks and I get the machine back to work on it.

As far as running the HDD test, I was able to boot using Linux Mint, but that USB drive does not have any MBR utilities. However, when I tried booting using my BartPE USB stick (which has the boot sector utility), it couldn't see the HDD. New information (from another forum), I have been informed that the BartPE WinXP environment does not have the right driver for a SATA drive, so that may be why it was unable to see the HDD.

Finally, please forgive my use of one huge "single paragraph" -- I am old school and in the early days of all ASCII-based forums, any use of an <Enter> key, had a very good chance of splitting up your post into several concatenated posts which were even more confusing.

Anyway, I hope someone can suggest a little utility that I can load onto my Linux Mint USB drive that I can run to fix (or at least, check) the boot sector on a WinVista HDD. Or perhaps someone will give me a suggestion on how I might use a Win7 or XP disk to fix it, since I don't have a Vista install disk.

Anyone else have a comment or suggestion? -Phil K. in Indy

Bob, thanks again. I just downloaded EasyBDC. Can I run that from a USB drive? Does it have to be "installed"? -Phil K in Indy

Bob, thanks for all the help, the computer is now up and running. Once I was able to get my hands on it again, I went through all the steps trying to repair the HDD, tried to run "EasyBDC" but could not figure out a way to get it to run from a USB drive. I had downloaded the version for WinVista since that was the OS on the sick machine, but when I tried to run EasyBDC from a WinXP boot, it would not run.

I had to abandon that and went to trying all the repair options on a WinVista install DVD:
1. I tried to "repair" the OS using the Vista install disk (did not work, after several attempts),
2. Tried to run the Bootrec.exe command with all the variables (did not help, after several attempts),
3. Finally tried to just reload the OS as a new install, knowing we would lose all the data, (refused to load).
In nearly all the attempts, it was like there was no HDD there -- the Vista install disk simply could not "see" the HDD.

Out of desperation, I swapped out the SATA drive for another one I had harvested from a laptop whose mobo had died several months earlier. The new (used) HDD formatted, took the new OS load and we are up and running! The donor HDD is only a quarter of the capacity of the failed HDD, but since the owner had only used a fraction of the space available, I think this one will work for him.

It is still a mystery why the bad HDD will not "boot", yet all the files are intact and accessible. I wired up the bad HDD to a little USB converter cable and I can see all the files - there are there - it just won't boot up.

Anyway, we can close out this episode. Thanks again for the support, help and guidance. -Phil K in Indy

I have a similar problem with my Gateway Laptop. It is three years old had a windows 7 operating system and worked fine until I saw I had a redirect virus. I ran a scan to get rid of it and when it restarted all that comes on is the Gateway startub and then a flashing cursor. I tried taking the battery out unplugging it restarting with just the adaptor but does the same thing. I even tried taking the memory out restarting and then puting the meomory back in and still no luck. Please help me get it back up.It is a Gateway NV53 with 320 G hd 4 G memory