I’ve got Vista Home Premium on my laptop. It came pre-installed with it and has been rock stable, until last week’s updates.
After the updates, it won’t boot. It won’t even boot in safe mode or safe mode with command prompt or with last known good configuration. It does the same in all cases — it looks like’s going to come up, I see the mouse pointer and can move it some, but no desktop appears, then it will spontaneously reboot. When it comes up next, it says Windows didn’t start up correctly.
I had an external mouse and keyboard connected, disconnected them. No change. So, I went poking around the recovery tools on the DVD. I couldn’t find the DVD that came with my Toshiba laptop, but I have another Vista Home Premium (Upgrade) DVD that I have and tried to use it. I found a number of repair options.
The first was an automatic repair. It failed. So, I then tried the boot repair. It found no errors. So, I tried to do restore point. It listed 3 possible restore points, but, it fails to be able to restore any of them, saying the files are corrupt.
At this point, I was wondering about health of my drive, so, I opened a command prompt and did a chkdsk /f /r on c. It found some minor errors which it said it corrected. So I ran it again and it came back clean. Tried to boot again, same results.
So, at this point, I figured that I could do an inplace reinstall. I’ve done that with very good success with XP. But, even with all those repair options on the Vista DVD, one that I could NOT find was to do an repair inplace installation. If I would tell it to do an install, it said it was going to rename the Windows directory and that the old Windows installation would be unavailable.
So, the primary question I have is, can it be done? That is, can I do an install on top of an existing installation that would (hopefully) fix what’s broke and keeping all my installed programs in place. As I said, I’ve done that many times with success on XP.
I’m wondering if the problem might be that I had SP1 on my laptop but the DVD I have is original release. Is that an issue? Or maybe the problem is I don’t have the right edition of the DVD? Or, maybe it just isn’t possible with Vista?
Any clues on next step? I’d rather not have to do a clean install. But, if I have to, I’m going to put XP on it. I’ve simply never had an XP installation fail to the point of being unrecoverable, unless the hard drive died. In my case, my hard drive seems fine, based on my chkdsk results.
