Windows freezes at starting windows screen

[hankhill17]

Last night, my laptop randomly shut itself off. When I tried to restart it, I get to the Windows Loading screen and a line of color moves across the top of the screen and freezes in the top right. I tried pulling the battery and starting up, starting up on just battery power, re-seating the hard drive, re-seating the RAM, pulling one DIMM and then the other and starting up that way. All of them have the same result. I ran everything in the automatic startup repair, still have the problem. Trying to run chkdsk and sfc from startup repair said I was pending a reboot for something and it couldn't run. Tried to go into safe mode with networking and it hangs after reporting halmacpi (I think).

I pulled the hard drive and connected it to my desktop, I could see everything and am currently backing up 100GB of data, so it doesn't appear to be a problem with the hard drive. My next thought was to go into the repair console and see what I can do, but it's a Dell that came with Vista and a free download of 7 so I don't have any media unless I borrow a disk from work.

System is a Dell E5500, Core 2 Duo P8600 with 3GB RAM.

I did go through some old posts about similar sounding problems, but since they all appeared to relate to desktops, I wanted to post fresh.

 

[DigiFixIt]

Try downloading a windows 7 recovery cd to see if it can detect any errors.

Its possible however that you may have some faulty hardware like video card or ram and might be worth getting a bootable cd to run memtest86 for a few hours to see if it reports any issues