Vista Wouldn't Restart After Power Failure

[FONT=&quot]This is a fairly long post so I hope you will bear with me. I have a Dell Inspiron 530s with Vista Home Premium SP1 installed. It has twin 250 GB internal hard drives installed in the Dell Data Safe configuration. That means that the second drive is strictly used for hardware backup for the first drive (which contains all of the Vista System and Data Files). If there is a hardware failure on one drive, the other drive contains a mirror image of the failed drive.

Dell uses a backup “partition” on the hard drive which is called the “D” drive. Norton “Save & Restore” came pre-installed with the system and periodically backups up the system in compressed format to the “D” drive or “partition”.

Obviously that’s not a great system since the “D” drive will eventually fill up as the data on the “C:” (system drive) increases over time, fills up that part of the hard drive and increases the size of subsequent back-ups. For that reason, I have gotten two 500 GB Iomega Prestige External Hard Drives to use for backup instead of using the “D:” partition on the internal Hard Drive.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]My plan is to alternate backup copies to each HD so that I will have 2 independent external backup copies at all times. For now, I just have the 1st 500 GB attached while I debug the process. Several days ago, I attached the 500 GB external HD and moved the next system backup to that drive instead of to the “D:” partition.

I experienced a full power outage in our neighborhood one night ago which completely powered down my system (fortuitously, I had just installed a new surge protector two days earlier). Normally when this has happened in the past, I simply power up the system, Vista reloads normally and I am back in business.

This time when I powered up, I attempted to re-start Vista normally. After about 15 minutes more minutes, I had nothing but a black screen. Figuring that something was wrong with the Vista re-start, I did another power-on re-start, since that was the only option available to me at that point. [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]After about another 10 minutes, I got a message saying that “System Startup Failed - Start-up Repair is Attempting to Repair this Computer Automatically – Do You Want to Continue”. I said “yes”. The message saying that “Start-up Repair” was taking place remained for another 15 minutes, after which I got a message saying “Do You Want to Restore the System to a Point Where it Was Working Properly?”.

I said no, mainly because I wanted to see if the system could repair itself and take-off without a restore. After about another hour, I got a message saying “Start-up Repair Cannot Repair This System Automatically”. It then provided the following information:

Problem Event name – Startup Repair V2

Problem Signature #1 – Auto Failover

Problem Sig #2 – 6.0.6000.16386.6.0.6001.18000 (this is the name of the drive for the 500 GB External HD)

Problem Sig #3 – 4

Problem Sig #4 – 65537

Problem Sig #5 - unknown

Problem Sig #6 – Bad Driver

The system then provided a number of additional problem signatures which I will skip here to save time. It then listed all of the “system repair tasks” which were performed. All except one were successful. Again, I will skip the successful ones. The one that failed was:

“System Files Integrity Check and Repair” – Result = failed, Error Code = 0X2, Time Taken = 1592895 ms

Finally, I got a message saying “If you have recently attached a device such as a camera or portable music player remove it and restart. If the problem continues, contact your computer manufacturer”.

Of course, I had just attached an external HD so I removed it and Vista started fine and worked normally on the re-start. By the way, the External HD had been connected and powered up during the night the system failed since a system backup had been scheduled for later in the evening.

So…..my question is what the heck happened?? Why did Vista get to the point where I nearly had to restore my system simply because I had attached an external HD? Also, prior to this incident, I could select the ‘Safe Remove Hardware” Icon in the system tray to “stop” the external Hard Drive, remove it from Vista and safely power it down when not in use.

Now, it will no longer let me “stop” the device and remove it from Vista. I now keep getting a message saying that I cannot remove the device because it is “in use”. I have verified through task manager and “services.msc” that there are NO tasks or services using it at the time and I can’t figure out why I am now getting that message. I never had this problem prior to the power failure and start-up failure I described earlier.

If anyone has any ideas about what is going on here I would appreciate hearing about it. Thanks in advance for any feedback.


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Are you sure nothing failed? A good surge suppressor? Was it over $100? I use Tripp Lite Line Conditioners and the circuit has a independent ground. My workstation has a 20A wall switch that is turned off during storms and low power.

I would start by running chkdsk c:/r. You might have to do an administrative repair from the DVD.