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Pressing F10 or F12 on start up should allow you to select which device to boot from. If that fails, try disconnecting the hard disk and booting from a rescue disk to prove that boot is OK. If that works you can remove the hard disk from the boot options in BIOS and retry. cheers, Paul

I was able to change the boot order to my CD/DVD drive alright. Then I unhooked the SSD and ran the rescue disk. This time it offered me the whole range of system repair options. However, none of them worked since the SSD wasn’t connected. As soon as I plugged it back in my computer reverted to its old endles loop behavior.

You might try following the hardware diagnostic steps recommended by HP…http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01443317

Been there, done that. Unfortunately I can only get the basic hardware diagnostics tests, which is how I found out that both my hard drive and memory are OK.

I assume you tried hitting F8 prior to the start of Windows boot to get the Advanced Startup Menu. If you kill the boot by holding down the power key and repeat this three times, you should get the advanced Startup screen again. Jerry

Oh yeah. Me and the F8 key are old friends by now. I tried to do what you said, but I don’t know you mean about killing the boot by holding down on the power key. If I do that it won’t start. Perhaps I’m missing something.

create a Paragon Rescue Disk

I was able to burn this disk with my old XP machine, but it didn’t work either. Nice suggestion tho.

BTW I don’t know if this is relevant or not but I just want to point something out. When I set up this computer initially I wanted to create a separate data partition. However, it turns out that I already had four partitions and by adding another one it became a dynamic disk. In order to keep it as a basic disk I had to delete one partion so I chose the Recovery one. I thought that this wouldn’t make any difference since I assumed that I could always use external media to restore it if necessary, but perhaps I was sadly wrong about this. Does that make any sense?

You might try the tips in this How-To Geek article…

Oh gosh, I’m not that much of a geek and I don’t know anyone familiar with Linux either.

===> shop

???

The recovery disk I’m using is one that I created myself since I don’t have the original Win 7 installation disk.

I did change the boot order as you suggested, but it didn’t make any difference. I could hear the disk spinning and there was a slight delay but the result was the same ol’ endless loop.

FWIW I did notice that the Boot Manager says that it’s supposed to boot from the EFI file, not the Notebook Hard Drive. I tried to change it but it keeps reverting back to this setting.

OK, Bruce. Thanks. I’ll do that.

I hope I’m in the right forum here since I have a question about MS updates, but if I’m not, please redirect me.

I’ve been getting the usual notifications the last couple of days about updates for MS Office 2010 32-bit version, which I have been declining by unchecking them since I’m running MS Office on Win 7 64-bit, but they keep coming back. Do I really need to download them or is there some way I can keep them from coming back over and over?

Actually, those are just browser Add-ons. The only Outlook Add-ins I have are for eClean and Send to Bluetooth, which I never use.

Anything in particular? I’m using Firefox 18 with some ad blockers. Is there something else I should be looking at?

That’s a good idea, but I don’t suppose there’s any way to do that after the fact as in my case, is there?

Actually, I had already tried scanpst.exe, but it choked up on me and wouldn’t finish. I also ran a trial version of Kernel for Outlook PST Repair, which ran for hours literally and recovered virtually everything as far as I could tell. If I hadn’t found a backup pst file on an external hard drive that was laying around, I would have glady paid the fifty bucks for it, but fortunately it wasn’t required.

As it turns out, I created a brand new pst file in Gmail and added the old one in Personal Folders from which I dragged over the messages that I wanted to save. Then I deleted the old file and compacted the new one. All went fairly well despite being rather cumbersome. Even managed to salvage a CSV file of contacts that I was able to import smoothly. The only disappointment is that the file size is still somewhat large (3.4 GB), but at least it opens much more quickly now that I have migrated from a 3 year old Toshiba running on Win XP to a new HP laptop with Win 7 that is much more zippy (3rd gen i5 w/8 GB RAM).

I see that I’ve still got more than 11,000 messages in my Inbox, so I guess the lesson out of all this is that I still need to prune out more of them if I really want to reduce my file size. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be as imperative as when my system was running so sluggishly, but I may still get around to it one of these days.

In parting, I just want to say for the record that I’m VERY impressed with the responses in this forum, which have been outstanding. I figured that I should have been able to work thru this issue that had been vexing me for some time and was pleasantly surprised by the ongoing support. Believe me, I’ve been to a lot of other forums where the thread just sort of petered out for lack of interest, which is quite disappointing. I would certainly come back here in a heartbeat if I get stumped on anything else.

That’s very good to know. Thanks for the tip. I’ll let you know how it turns out when I’m finished.

I don’t know about other email providers, but at least with Gmail you have the option to enable POP for all mail or enable POP for mail that arrives from now on, the latter choice of which would be preferable for me.

In that scenario, I guess the only thing remaining would be for me to figure out how to save the contact list so that I could add it later.