Help! New laptop with Vista

I guess i should have joined a forum like this a lwhile ago, never really thought about it though. Anyway,

Problem is, i have a Toshiba Satelite A200 Laptop with windows vista. It was working fine, i downloaded AVG antivirus, done a scan and it moved a couple files to the virus vault. when finished doing what i was doing, i shut down the laptop, went to start it up this morning and it comes up with the following boot msg -

windows was unable to start. aecent software/hardware change mite be the problem. Insert your windows cd to fix it.
File/boot/bcd
status: 0xc000000f
Info: An error occurred while attemting to read the boot configuration data.

The laptop is 6months old and didnt come with a cd. As im pretty sure a part of the hard drive has the cd type thing in it, to reformat.

Ive bought a recovery boot cd online, downloaded it from housemates computer, burnt it to cd and put it in.. it works for a bit, then the screen shuts of.. ive left it go for half hour, and still blank screen.

Any help how to just reformat it or somthing would be great! thankyou.
Clint

Hmmm... I checked that error code in the Microsoft Knowledge Base... The only thing I've found is entries for Win 2K and XP saying that it's related to system files which are either missing or had been replaced with invalid ones... But the entries are old, and I'm not sure how they would relate to Vista.

Windows File Protection may not start


What I would do first is revert to the last known good profile -
Restore Complete Computer


It seems like what you're going to have to do is use the recovery partition. But I'd advise to not do that until you've determined it's the last resort.

The screen going blank could be the computer going into sleep mode, by the way. When you get the computer running again, maybe you should turn off the sleep mode so that it won't fall asleep during scans.

I'd say try using the recovery partition if there is one. Check the boot options when the computer starts up. On my gateway, if I press F8 during startup I get the option to restore the hard drive from the recovery partition. I don't know what key it would be on your computer though.

Thanks for the reply guys, I cant get into windows to do system restore. The first thing that comes up is the toshiba screen, and it says press F2 or F12 for boot order. Then it just go's to that error message. i cant get past that message. Ive tryed using the recovery disc linex thing i downloaded, it said it will start windows if windows cant do it itself. But it just gets to a point when it's loading and screen go' s black, im not sure if it is going into sleep cause when it usually sleeps the power light flashers amber colour.

How can i get to the recovery partition?

Man.. If you can't get in, then there's not a whole lot we can do. At this point, about the best I could do for ya is tell you to contact Toshiba for support:

Toshiba Support - Homepage

Ok thanks Scotteq, I'll just get the computer shop to reformat it. I downloaded all the drivers from the Toshiba website. Cheers.