Vista won't boot - now what?

Yup, this is my first post, well because up to now I have not had many issues, but now I do, and I'm looking for a little help.

I am writing to you on a 10+ year old IBM running XP that I have never had any major issues with. Never blue screened, never had to FDISK, PC just keeps on running.

I bought an HP pavilion last summer with Vista Home Premium, and up to now it's run OK, has has some lock ups and memory errors, has been a little different to use, but beats using the old AMD 450 I am writing to you on.

Last week my spouse was using it, as she often is to read email and chat on the Internet, and she claims it appeared to stop responding, so she did a soft restart. Now the PC will no longer start up Vista. She claims she did not do a hard reboot, but knowing her patience for PCs, there is the possibility she did.

When the PC starts up it indicates that the system did not shut down cleanly, recommends running the startup repair utility and gives the option of doing this or starting up windows. When I run the repair utility the system indicates that Windows is loading files, it then shows the "Cylon" like status bar and then locks up. Running Windows does the same thing. I tried to startup in Safe Mode, but it looks like I don't quite make it far enough to get there.

As with most OEMs, HP did not ship a copy of Vista or even the OEM version, and I unfortunately have not created either a Vista boot disk or recovery disk from the new PC. I was able to get an iso image on a CD that I could boot up from, but it appears to more or less do the same thing when the startup repair utility is performed. With the iso boot disk I was able to get to a Window that is set up to install Vista, and/or perform some utilities, but when I try and do some checks on my system they fail because it can't see my hard disk, and it needs driver files. Went looking for driver files, but could only get a executable installer from HP or anywhere else, and this would not run from the command prompt.

I got very little help from any contact made with HP, appeared to be some kind off offshored English as a second language helpdesk, other than order the disks for $45 and reinstall Vista.

Before I order the disks and start from scratch I would like to know if there is anything else I can try. I would like to do a manual memory check, and a check disk to eliminate potential hardware issues, although I don't see any memory errors during the BIOS checks, and it appears that the startup repair process is running from a partition in the hard disk.

Some co-workers of mine bought the exact same PC. If I get them to create me a restore point DVD from the initial build, is there a chance I can use this, or is this bound to the hardware or OS SW license. This may be cheaper and faster than getting disks from HP.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated ...

PJ

Hi Jonesey.

I'm sorry you are having troubles booting up. I too had problems with my HP and had to resort to reinstalling the operating system.

There is a couple ways you can do this without having to order disks from HP. The first one is to hit f11 when the computer first boots up. That should take you to a recovery partition on your hard drive and you should be able to restore your operating system from there.

If that doesn't work, you can try and borrow a Vista Install DVD (upgrade or full version - doesn't matter - neither does the version of Vista) and do a clean install with it. You will be prompted for a install key - just use the key on the sticker on your computer. The key you enter will tell the operating system what version of Vista to install. (This worked for me using an upgrade version of Home Premium to install a full version of Ultimate) The HP website is very good for providing drivers for your computer. Make sure you visit it with the computer you are using now and download the drivers for your model of computer.

Hopefully, one of those methods will work for you if and when you have to reinstall Vista. Good luck!

Snarks