PLease HELP with Vista

C

carolyncaylor

Member
Hello,
OK, I have a HP laptop with Vista Installed, No Disc came with computer.
A few nights ago all I was getting was a black screen when I tried to boot. I Tried a total system recovery. It did not work. I got it to load but it locked up in the middle of setting up vista. It will not let me go into safe mode cause it tells me the instaltion is not complete. I know thar vista is still there cause I can see it when I go into recovery tool. But the recovery tool, nothing works in there, I know a little about computers. But this is kickin my butt. Its about to drive me crazy. PLease help..........
 
I would say format the Vista partition and attempt total system recovery once more.. how are you going about doing that, anyway?
 
HP

Its aHP Pavilion Laptop, I got the system to recovery finally,. but it is still unstable, when i turn computer back on it still will not boot right up. most of t he time it goes to a black screen, and will not boot and I have to do a hard shut down a few times for it to finally boot.
 
How did you recover it ? System restore or factory reset ?
If you've still got an unstable system after system restore, and you have no earlier restore points to go to, take the opportunity while the system is running to copy off, or burn to optical disk, all of your personal data, then do a factory reset.
If you did a factory reset and it's still unstable, did you do a full (long) format of the partition before recovering ?
If not, try again allowing yourself the several hours it will probably take while it goes through removing any dodgy sectors from future use before you let Vista reinstall.
If you've done all that, have you done a memory test to make sure it's not your RAM giving you problems. ?
 
i did a full recovery of the eystem by hitting f11 when turning the computer on,

If not, try again allowing yourself the several hours it will probably take while it goes through removing any dodgy sectors from future use before you let Vista reinstall.
If you've done all that, have you done a memory test to make sure it's not your RAM giving you problems

^
I havr no idea what all that means or how to go about doing that.
 
You can do a RAM test by holding down F8 as you boot and selecting the memory diagnostic option from the menu presented, or you can go into admin tools/memory diagnostics and tell Vista to do a check automatically on the next boot.
When you reinstall Vista (or any OS) it will give you the option as you begin, to do a format of the disk space, with a "quick" or "full/long/complete(can't quite remember what word it uses exactly)" format.
If you don't have any problems with your disk, you can opt for quick, and it will basically do the equivalent of resetting the index, which makes the partition appear to be empty and clean, but it doesn't actually do anything to the actual main section of the disk.
The long option, will go through the whole physical surface of the disk and check every block for errors, and mark any bad blocks it finds so that they're never used again. This is the option to pick if you suspect, or know that you have problems with the HDD.
 
If you choose to do it at boot time, the way you select "Memory Diagnostics" from the boot menu is by pressing "Tab" to switch to the bottom-half of the screen (tools) - not up/down which will move you around the top-half of the screen (operating systems).
 
Hey, Carolyn, are you still having problems with your laptop ?

Let me tell you what I think it is. In two words: your computer is FRIED ! And it's the NVidia (integrated!) video card that seems to cause it. I had the same problem with my Pavilion 9210.
Check the links below:

1. Look for your model in the table and see if its initial symptoms were as described by HP:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...docname=c01087277&printable=no&encodeUrl=true

2. NVidia's business update - press release, telling us about the great job they did and blaming everybody else for it >.<
http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1215037160521.html?_templateId=320

3. And an article on cnet news that explains everything, if still needed:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13554_3-10020782-33.html


Anyway, as I said before, I'm afraid your laptop has a major hardware issue and I hope for you it is still under warranty one way or another (note that HP extended their warranty to 2 years specifically for this issue). Mine jost got back from repairs (after 7 weeks - HP has a shortage on parts, of course!) and the technical report says that they had to replace the motherboard, the microprocessor and the memory ! Can you imagine how much it would have costed me ?

Let me know how things will go for you...
 
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