Vista - Windows error recovery. not booting

Hello Angie, and welcome to Vista Forums.

If you have a recovery partition, then this will show you how to reinstall Vista back to factory defaults for you laptop.

Gateway Support - Full Factory Recovery

Hope this helps,
Shawn

thanks for reply.
Have thought of doing this however laptop came with vista basic and we upgraded to vista home premium. Also everything i have read about doing this means losing data. (could be wrong and if data won't be lost then i think i would be willing to go back to vista basic in order to have an operating system again)
(just read your link. Very helpful but not ready for this drastic measure yet until we could hopefully save our data. Also the original setup was crap. Who in their right mind sells a system where the insalled software is incompatible with the operating system and the unfortunate purchaser is on the helpline constanlty from the start to try and get their new laptop operational? I guss thats a rant for another time)

I think there is a recovery partition but not sure if it has anything in there now. Is that the area that you can back up to? if it is then it became full some time ago and we backed up to an external hard drive (again could probably use this but don't want to lose new data and haven't backed up completely for a very long time)

I guess our main priority is not to loose data (if at all possible)
and be able to boot into system.
Then sort out underlying issues that caused problem in the first place.

No problem Angie.

Yes, doing a factory restore would format your hard drive and you would lose anything currently on it.

You might see if you can do a System Restore using a restore point dated before this problem to see if it can fix it.

tried restore points. all of them!!

I think we have to go to a pro IT Doctor! Hopefully they can then at least try and save data from hard drive somehow before sorting system.

thanks anyway

Will it allow you to boot into Safe Mode so that you can copy your data to DVD or USB flash drive?

no won't go into safe mode. I think this option only came up once when my husband was trying to fix things but i've never seen a safe mode option anywhere!
Anyway husband is frustrated and has called an IT guy to take it away and sort. Hard drive will be removed and data saved elswhere and laptop hopefully fixed.

thanks for your advice anyway and hope someone else finds this helpful.

Ok Carmine. I hope that they can get it fixed for you quickly and cheaply.

Could this be a sign of a defective hard-drive or corruption?

I'm guessing that's what it is. If it is, you're recovery media won't work. This had happened to me.

What file does it stop loading windows at in Safe Mode? To get to safe mode you might need to do a few boots.