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I apologise if I'm a little vague and can give more info if needed.

My vista machine has been working fine until today when I tried booting it. Vista loads showing the loading bar then goes to a black screen with the cursor on which you can move. It then remains like this for several minutes, during this time the computer doesn't sound like it's doing much, it is relatively quiet. Finally the welcome screen appears. It stays on this for several minutes again and the computer reboots. This keeps happening and the machine fails to load in safe mode - the same thing happens.

I booted the pc with the vista disk in and ran repair your computer and used the system repair. It took about 20 minutes saying it was repairing damaged files. I booted the pc again and the same happened. I loaded the pc with the vista disk again and chose repair my computer again. System repair seemed to run automatically this time and agian it did the same. I rebooted and the problem persisted. I then tried system restore to a few days ago. After half a hour as it finished it said it failed due to a portion (Possibly Partition - JT) being corrupt.

I am really not sure what to do now. Any advice appreciated!

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  • You shouldn't post the same question to both SU and SF (serverfault.com/questions/97634/…)
    – pavium
    Commented Dec 28, 2009 at 2:24
  • Have you recently (un)installed something? Try hitting ctrl+alt+delete at the login screen and kill any strange looking processes. also, what happens when you boot into safe mode?
    – Moshe
    Commented Dec 28, 2009 at 2:39
  • Corrupt system restore... Could be damage hard drive or a virus. I would try booting a live CD with an antivirus program and scanning the drive.
    – Moshe
    Commented Dec 28, 2009 at 2:54
  • just curious, are you able to successfully start the machine in safe mode?
    – user5195
    Commented Dec 28, 2009 at 3:56

3 Answers 3

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There are a few main culprits:

-- hard drive is failing -- registry is damaged

However, what I have seen is that if all USB devices (other than kbd and mouse) are unplugged before the system powers up, the boot up of vista is more reliable.

See if that helps...

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Sounds like something bad happened to your hard drive. Hit it with a hard drive repair utility - something a little more heavy duty than the one Microsoft provides. I'm partial to SpinRite, which costs a bit of cash, but I believe it does have a money-back guarantee, so you can always just request a refund if it fails you.

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  • Hi I've managed to install unbuntu on the free space and it works fine. Thanks I shall try that software to fix the bad partition
    – Joomaz
    Commented Dec 28, 2009 at 14:55
  • SpinRite, at least, doesn't do anything filesystem-specific. If the problem is with the partition table, file allocation table or something intrinsic to the partition, not the disk, it probably won't help. That said, chkdsk has clearly failed, so I guess it's not fixable that way anyway. Good luck.
    – Samir Talwar
    Commented Dec 29, 2009 at 23:05
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I hope your data is backed up, because you're probably heading towards a reinstallation of Windows.

A free product that specializes in boot problems is Paragon's Rescue Kit 9.0 Express. This boot CD fixes boot problems, rescues your data to another local drive / partition / CD/DVD, and more.
Use this product first to save your data, then to try and fix your problem.

If the problem is fixed, do a "chkdsk -r -f".

If nothing helps, reinstall Windows, but with a full reformat of the hard disk (not with a quick format).

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