Lenovo B5400stuck on ThinkVantage recovery page

[EsmeNation]

Just before I start, I have a Lenovo B5400 with a Windows 7 operating system.

Hello, so I have had my laptop since christmas 2014 and only a few days ago I encountered a problem.

I was noticing that my laptop was running especially slow and, being the impatient person that I am, I shut down my laptop using the power button. When I restarted my laptop again, however, (selecting "Start Windows Normally") I was horrified to see that my laptop went to the blue screen of death.

This is the bsod I encountered:

So my laptop automatically restarted and it brought me to this screen:

Selecting the recovery option, my laptop shows a black screen (that looks like windows xp) that says "windows is loading files" and it then shows the loading screen and, ultimately, to what I can only assume is the Lenovo recovery system page. It's a picture of a lifebuoy and the words "ThinkVantageTechnologies" with the Lenovo logo in the corner. Past the fan whirring and a loading sign on the mouse in the first few seconds, no further progress was made on this screen. I have repeated this whole process by force shutting down and starting over multiple times, but I still get the same result; no matter how long I wait (I have waited hours before now), nothing occurs and I am seemingly stuck on this page. (I am able to move the mouse when on this page)

[video]

I have provided a video of this whole process so you can fully see what is happening. I am no computer genius and I'm too scared to use Safe Mode or anything in fear of what it may delete. My laptop is NOT BACKED UP and I have AVG 2015 running. I would really like to keep all my files too. If anyone can help, I would appreciate it. I just wanted to check to see if anyone could help here before taking it to a repair shop.

[ityodawannabe]

Have you ran Lenovo's BIOS diags on it?  It could be that you have a hardware issue.  Try on boot up to select F10.  This is Lenovo's diagnostics.  Run the extended tests to see if it is a hardware issue.  You can also try getting to a command prompt, usually F8, and run check disk with the repair switch.  At a command prompt C:\ type "chkdsk /f" without the parenthesis.  This should fix any errors on you hard drive.  Good Luck!

[EsmeNation]

Thank you so much for your help so far, I really appreciate it! I did find the errors;

Unfortunately, I did encounter a problem when doing Safe Mode with Command Prompt (video of tha included). Also, the message I got mentions backing up before taking action... If I need to do this,  how would I go about doing it? (Considering I can't start up my laptop)

 Video error

Again, thank you for your help.

[ityodawannabe]

Sorry to hear it is a hardware issue.  Not knowing your level of technical skills, what I would suggest, and this is only a suggestion.

Order the recovery media from Lenovo, unless it came with them, many laptops did.

Buy a new hard drive and install it and the OS from the disks.

Buy a "Universal hard drive adapter".  On Amazon it is about $30.00

Connect your old hard drive to your laptop with the adapter.  The adapter has a USB cable.

Then copy your files from the old drive to your new drive.

Other than that, there are businesses that will do data recovery for a price and replace and install hard drive and OS as well.  You would have to Google and find one that you like. 

I hope you can retrieve all your data.  Good Luck.

[CBHedricks · Accepted solution]

This is definitely a Hard Drive issue, the SMART test failure is the key.  If you have a freind you can trust to help you with this (and is a techie) then you can try using a Linux OS DVD to boot the computer and see if your files are still intact before you spend money on a hard drive to USB adapter.  If your files are intact, and can be seen from the Linux OS file manager it should be possible to recover them to a new drive as others have indicated.

Cheers.

CB