Blank screen towards the end of windows 7 reinstall

[Weaklygood2]

My brother's Samsung laptop (sorry, don't know the name, cannot find out) has had a windows update, causing the computer to be extremely slow after booting. He found the OS disc that came with the laptop and I popped it in and had it reinstall the OS, but keep the drives and such. Windows 7 almost finished installing, but it has to reboot and do some sort of setup. When booted in normal mode, the screen is blank (No video being sent), and in safe mode, video is there, but I am prompted with the message to reinstall, as windows cannot be installed in safe-mode. I have no access to my desktop or anything. If there is a fix other than wiping the laptop clean, please reply. Thanks in advance.

[Allan]

Why didn't you just uninstall the update?

At this point I have no idea what you've done, so I suggest you boot to the Windows DVD and do a CLEAN install (either delete and recreate the system partition or at the very least, reformat it). If there is data on the drive that you need to save you can either try a parallel install (install a second instance of Windows) or, best bet, slave the drive to another computer, copy the files you need, then do a clean install.

[Weaklygood2]

I would like to simply delete all the partitions and have one big one. (His hard drive was split into four) Is there any way to do this without having an OS loaded? Also, I don't have any of those fancy doohickeys that turn an internal hard drive into an external one.

[Weaklygood2]

Nevermind, saw that an option was available while the disc was being booted. Thanks for helping.

[patio]

It's still unclear what your goal is for this laptop...
1 of the 4 partitions is most likely the hidden Recovery partition...i'd keep that if i were you...
If you want it to stay as is without a re-install...which would wipe everything then the other partitions cand be merged into one....
I suggest you post a screenshot of the HDD from Disk Management...

[Geek-9pm]

The link below is from Microsoft.
Installing and reinstalling Windows 7
Note  there are options to format the disk if you want. You should not need other software and hardware. It is all on the Windows 7 Install DVD.

[patio]

Too late i'm afraid...wait til he stops back cause all his data is gone...
I predict it...

[Weaklygood2]

My goal was for the laptop to run at a decent speed after login, preferably with all the data still in tact, but part of the hard drive was backed up, so it's okay.