I have a Sony Vaio SVE171C11L laptop running Windows 8.1, roughly 2 years old. Have been traveling with it for a while, so it gets bounced around a lot.
Two days ago, I turned this laptop on and found that dark colors were replaced by red flickering (it's an LED screen I believe). The laptop still worked fine, but the flickering was annoying. I opened it up, put it back together, flickering went away for a bit. Was even able to watch YouTube videos, though the red flickering did come back.
Today, I turned my laptop on and saw just an empty screen. Impatiently I did a hard restart by holding down the power button; when I turned it back on, it went into auto repair mode. It gave me the spinner with a "fixing your hard drive" message for a while, then rebooted and did the same again. Then again. I decided to let it work this out for itself and left for a few hours.
At some point, Auto Repair decided that it couldn't help me, and stopped going through the same stuff over and over. Now, I get a pretty blue screen where I can choose "Continue" (which reboots and lands me back at the same screen), Use a device, and Troubleshoot. I went into Troubleshoot, Advanced Options, Command Prompt and did a chkdsk - my c: drive is fine. I can even navigate to the drive and see all the files. So, I don't think the hard drive is the issue. I also don't think the red flickering is the root cause--after I had this auto repair issue, I opened it up again and found that a cable was a little loose where it plugs into the display. Tightened up the cable, red flickering went away.
I'm not sure where this leaves me. How do I convince Windows to boot up again? (PS I have also tried "Refresh your computer" which claims it can't run. I also don't have any restore points to restore to.)
One more note: I looked at SrtTrail.txt. It says "Root cause found: System volume on disk is corrupt.
Repair action: File system repair (chkdsk)
Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0
Time taken = 175110 ms"
Again, chkdsk says I'm fine, and I can go into the console and see the files on the drive.