Windows Cannot Boot - 0xc0000225

Question

I've had Windows 7 installed for months on my Thinkpad T60 laptop and today out of the blue when I tried to boot, it started the Windows loading screen and immediately I got this error: Status: 0xc0000225 Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

Through some research, I see people get this problem when a repartitioning goes wrong or there's a problem with their dual boot. I'm not dual booting my machine and I haven't messed with my partitions since I installed the OS. This error is truly out of the blue.

I've run memory diagnostics from a Windows boot disc and hard drive diagnostics from my BIOS and neither found a problem. I don't have any backups to restore from so I'm hoping to find a fix for this. Anyone seen this kind of thing before?

Thanks

Edit: I really don't think the hard drive is dying. It's only 3 years old and has shown no problems so far. I am able to access the drive from an Ubuntu Live CD (thank god!) so I can backup my files if I need to format & reinstall the OS. But if I can access the drive fine, why can't I boot from it‽

SOLVED: I finally burned a new Windows 7 disc (legally) since I didn't have mine and the repair utility on it fixed the problem.

Answer 1

I would imagine that the hard drive is dying, the boot sector will be readable so Windows can get into the boot loader but no further.

I would remove the hard drive from the laptop and put it into another computer to retrieve data.

Alternatively, use the ThinkPad PC doctor to perform a full hardware test.

Answer 2

Try this software

http://majorgeeks.com/HDD_Regenerator_d5235.html

How it works Almost 60% of all hard drives damaged with bad sectors have an incorrectly magnetized disk surface. We have developed an algorithm which is used to repair damaged disk surfaces. This technology is hardware independent, it supports many types of hard drives and repairs damage that even low-level disk formatting cannot repair. As a result, previously unreadable information will be restored. Because of the way the repair is made, the existing information on the disk drive will not be affected!