When starting up there's just a blank black screen with a blinking cursor on the top left of screen.

I waited for hours and still won't boot.

I tried fixmbr, rebuildbcd from Vista DVD and it didn't help.

Any help? I'm tired of reinstalling Vista again and again.



Thanks in advance.

have you just recently installed a program or service pack ?

Yes, i have installed service pack 1. But there was no problem after i restart when the SP1 installation is done.

When did the problem actually start? Where you playing a game or something?

I was dual booting with Ubuntu. I opened disk management to shrink one of my partition as i want to install something else, anyway, I shrink 10 GB,formatted and give it a name like ( L: ). I don't remember what it was but it warned me before changing that partition's drive letter and i clicked yes. Then all the partitions went to a color like yellow.
I have another hard disk for music. It was looking as primary. Then I restarted and GRUB loaded and it couldn't find Vista installation. Then I removed Ubuntu and Vista. And just installed Vista. So when I restarted again i saw that blinking cursor.

I know it's too long to read but i don't know what to do.. I installed Vista 10 times in 3 days.

I know how you feel.

You should probably remove the music hard drive cos you don't want to lose your music as well.

have you tried CHKDSK and actually repairing vista?
After you uninstall vista and ubuntu did you reformat the hard drive?

I haven't tried chkdsk because i don't think there's a problem in file system. I formatted the shrinked partition of ubuntu and add it back in to my D: partition. As i said i think when i shrink and format the partition from D drive all the partitions except for my music disk (luckily ) went yellow. And something happened there. It set my music hard disk as primary.(music hard disk is in another color btw). I think I should set my Vista installed C: partition as primary or active. (I don't know how to do it ) What do you think ?

... I wish I could post some screenshots of that disk management window but u know, it just won't boot. I'm at work btw..

You should set your c:\ as active and primary as this is the harddrive with the operating system on it.How are you using your computer at the moment? How did you change your music drive to primary in the first place?
because you have to have C:\ as your primary.
have you done
Sfc \Scannow
and
I'm pretty sure CHKDSK scans for drive corruption and errors ,but Sfc\scannow scans for file error.

I didn't set my music drive as primary manually. It happened after I did the partitioning. I right clicked on C: and there wasn't any "Set as Active" command.

Is there any way to set a partition primary manually in dos. Because I can only access to dos window in the Repair section of Vista dvd. Is there any command to do it ?

Hi,
I found this.

Set active partition using command line
If you screwed something up in Windows and marked the wrong partition as active, you will no longer be able to boot your computer. In the case where you cannot mark a partition as active using Windows, you’ll have to us the command line.
First get into the command prompt using a boot up disk and type diskpart at the prompt.
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At the DiskPart prompt, type in list disk. You will see the list of disk currently attached to your computer. Now type in select disk n, where n is the disk number. In my example, I would type select disk 0.

Now that we have selected the correct disk, type in list partition to get a list of all the partitions on that disk. To select the partition we want to set as active, type in select partition n, where n is the partition number.

Now that we have selected the disk and partition, we can mark it as active by just typing the word active and pressing Enter. That’s it! Now the partition is set.
Most people are familiar with using FDISK to mark a partition as active, but that is now an older and out-dated method. You should use DISKPART to manage disk and partitions on a Windows XP and Vista computer. Enjoy!

How to set active partition in Vista and XP