Let me start by saying that I claim to have absolutely no knowledge regarding the technical in's and out's of PCs. I do know how to use them in the usual day-to-day activities that revolve around the home and school environment. Outside of that, every bit of information I have acquired has been through the school of trial and error. With that said I will try to describe my situation as best I can.....
I have a Gateway Desktop, model GT5404 with a few minor upgrades by way of video card, sound card, and ram. It came with Vista Home Premium installed and, for the record, this machine is the first experience I have had with Vista...period.
Several weeks ago I started to notice some quirky behavior regarding switching to and from user accounts and ending up in a neverending user account screen cycle. The only way to get around it involved a complete restart, so I started looking online for information as to what the cause may or not be. I will add that Kaspersky ran as the AV program supplemented by Uniblue's Powersuite. After much looking, reading and online chatting it became apparent that the common denominator may have been a recent security install due to automatic updates. I went into the event viewer, found the installs that coincided with the buggy issue and (Heaven Help Me!) deleted them to the recycle bin. Yes I know now...not a good move... After the next restart, Vista invariably gave me an blue error screen. Going down the checklist I tried to boot in any of the available safe modes, to no avail. Either a blue error screen or a loop back to the 'Advanced Boot Options' menu. Next step was to try to repair/reinstall the OS from operating system disk that came with the pc. No luck there either. The screen hangs on the system32/drivers screen on the crcdisk file. I can't even get to the repair/reinstall screen.
Next logical step after perusing the web was to find a way to boot up, if nothing else but to determine that all information was still intact. I burned an image of Ubuntu to disk and changing boot priority was able to launch in linux. All programs and files intact. Okay, cool. Now mind you, at this point of this wonderful endeavour I must have greyed 5 years, because I know nothing about linux, grub4dos, emulators, command lines, etc., but I do now within this 3 day crash course. I have burned several other recovery cds to see if they would boot, but no luck. Same result as the original OS disk. I have come to the conclusion that I need to fix those files, or put them back, or find some way to chkdisk or fix the boot registry. Can this be done by way of grub4dos? All I want to do is get those files back in place or fix the bootldr. Can this be done? Since I have Home Premium I can't access the d:recovery partition and even though Gateway's manual says that F8 will get me to the advanced boot screen, the option to 'repair' isn't there even though the manual says it should be. Note: nowhere in the manual does it mention anything about needing a certain version of Vista or a certain model of PC. Frustrating.
I am really trying to avoid buying another SATA drive, installing the OS, and installing it into the tower just to fix the problem. Any advice, help, or insight would be greatly appreciated. The ironic thing is...despite the frustration of the situation, I am really enjoying learning more about just how expansive everything is 'behind the scenes' so to speak.
01-03-2009
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