Vista corrupted?

[FalvinP]

I'm not sure if I'm posting in the right place, but here goes.

My boot drive is one of the Seagagtes that have had such controversy lately. A few weeks ago I performed the firmware update and it seemed to have no ill effects.

Even before I did this, I've noticed that every once in a while the machine would take a while to boot up. A few weeks ago it wouldn't boot at all. I played around with easy gig II to try and restore a backup but the program wouldn't recognize my external backup drive, which was connected via esata. After some further frustration, all of a sudden the machine booted up, although it did take a little while to do so. During all this time I've scaned the drive with sea tools for dos and have untilized the drive monitoring software (I think it's called SMART) and have received no indication that the drive is going bad.

I left the machine on after that. Last night, after not being used for several hours I noticed the computer was completely locked up with a black screen. All I could do was was power off and then back on to reboot.

It would not boot after that. The starting screen with the moving band would show up for a while and then would go to a blank screen again and then would juist sit there for a long time (15-20 minutes) until I attempted to reboot again. After thinking about it, I decided to try a repair install of Window Vista Home Premium OEM that I bought from Newegg when I built my computer. All I got when I attempted to boot from the dvd was the opening blue/green screen with nothing on it at all. It took a while for the installation dvd to get to this point. I'm wondering why I couldn't get to the opening setup screenwith my Windows dvd.

I took out the drive, put it into my external enclosure, and took it to my parents laptop to test. After assigning permission to access my folder, I was able to view my data, so I don't think it's the drive.

I guess there's something corrupted in Vista. I'd like to try a repair install before I have to do a full reinstall of Vista, which will take a lot of time of course. I have all of my data pretty well backed up, so doing a reinstall would be more of an inconvenience than anything else.

Am I stuck doing a reinstallation? If I am forced to completely reinstall Vista I'm going to get a Western Digital black to use as the boot drive. It would be nice to clone the drive when I put in the new drive, but if Vista is broken I wouldn't want toi do that.

Thanks for your advice.

[shadowpr]

Doing a repair install shouldn't hurt any.

But I don't like that it took a while for the dvd.

Is this the system in your sig? If so, try only having one hd connected, and no peripherals connected and try to boot.

Also could try with just one stick of ram.

[FalvinP]

Yes, I'm talking about the system in my sig.

Even with the dvd as the first boot drive, it still took several minutes to get to the first screen. I never got anything past it. I'll disconnect everything and see if I can get it to boot.

If that doesn't work, I'll try to get to the repair console.

Thanks for your input.

[Panama Red]

I don't think you can do a "repair install" with Vista like you can with XP. Vista's only option is a reformat so you'll have to backup all your data first and reinstall. Here's just one of several sites that came up when I searched "Vista repair install" with Google.

http://vistasupport.mvps.org/windows...ir_options.htm

[FalvinP]

I have reinstalled my original boot drive and have disconnected everything (printer, two external hard drives, one internal hard drive, powered usb hub) except the usb keyboard and mouse. I also left the speakers connected to the audio jack. Right now only the boot drive and the dvd drive (which I forgot to disconnect) are connected. I was able to successfully boot the computer.

One piece of hardware that isn't in my sig is a 3 yr old usb Western Digital MyBook external hard drive. That means originally I had my Apricorn enclosure connected via esata and the mybook connected via usb.


I haven't taken out any memory yet. I have 4 gig of memory (1 gig stick in each of four slots.

I've rebooted two more times with no problems. Would this mean that there could be a problem with the peripherals that were attached? This seems to be an intermittent situation as a similar situation happened a month or so ago.

I guess I should start plugging stuff back in and then reboot.

I looked at the link Panama provided and found the part in the installation process called "repair your computer." I guess this is what I was thinking of when I mentioned doing a repair install.

Should I do a memory test as well? I think I have the Ultimate boot disk that should have memtest on it. When I upgraded to 4 gig of ram last year, I ended up having a stick of bad ram that I had to rma. I suppose another stick could have gone bad.

Thanks for your help.

[shadowpr]

Running memtest wouldn't hurt anything. Just take some time.

If you don't have the problem now, then I would add one thing back, and reboot.

Continue this process till you have a problem, and then disconnect the last thing you connected back. If the problem goes away again, then you found the culprit.