[markomus]

I have a Gateway MT6709 (Windows Vista). It won't boot to Windows and keeps restarting.

I restarted with a copy of Ubuntu Live. Success. It has to be something with the hard drive.

So I hooked the hard drive up to my other computer via USB adapter. It was slow to recognize the new hardware, but it eventually came up and I was able to access and scan the hard drive. Nothing, really, except that it was slow in recognizing that there was anything hooked up at all.

I suspect that whatever makes it slow to be detected like that is also making it hard for the Gateway to properly detect the hard drive.

Wondering if anyone recognizes this problem and say, "Oh, yeah...that means your drive is toast" or "Oh, yeah...that means you just need to do a system recovery using Gateway's automated system recovery."

[Hughv]

Run ckhdsk /r on this drive and see if it has bad sectors.

[markomus]

WOW did it find a LOT wrong! But when I put it back in the laptop a warning message came up about SMART failure and the need to back up all files, etc. It didn't boot into Windows. So I think we can safely call this one toast.

Thanks!