Vista 32 bit Recovery Disk Qs

MQA123

Member
First of all, thanks for all the useful info on your website..

I'm having an issue with my HP dv9000z laptop which has a Windows Vista 32 bit OS.

My laptop won't boot in normal or safe mode so I've downloaded the Vista 32-bit recovery disk. The .iso file downloaded fine and I burned it with Imgburn onto a DVD and it booted fine on the laptop.
I chose the 'repair your computer' option which brought me to the list of recovery options. Now this is where I'm not sure I made the right choice. I decided to start at the top and chose 'startup repair'. The thing is its still going 14 hours later. I tried to cancel out of it but it tells me I can't cancel it while its running. Problem is I don't know if its ever going to stop. Should I just power down the laptop and start again picking another option under 'System Recovery Options'? If so which is the correct recovery option to choose?

Also, just to note when I access the System recovery options page...where it says 'select an operating system to repair and click next. Only Vista operation systems are listed and can be repaired'....my options here are just BLANK. There's no operating system listed? Could this be part of the problem as to why the startup repair seems to be just hanging?

Anyway any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Hi MQA, welcome to NST.
The "startup repair" takes a few seconds at most. It is pretty stupid, only capable of one thing at a time, so might need to be run several times to fix all aspects of a broken boot, but each iteration should take less than a minute.
Your "repair" is obviously not doing anything constructive.
The inability to see a Vista to repair can happen with multiple HDDs, especially if a mix of IDE and SATA exists.
If that's the case, disconnect all HDDs other than the boot disk and try the startup repair again.
If that doesn't apply, try running a chkdsk /f against your Vista partition using the "command prompt" option on the second screen. (That will probably take a long time, checking the disk for errors)
When it's finished try the repair again.
 
Thanks for the reply Terry60,

I don't have multiple hard drives but I do have a dual hard drive on my laptop - its a 240GB 5400rpm SATA Dual Hard Drive. Would this cause the OS not to show up?
When you say 'disconnect' do you mean open up the laptop and physically take it out, or do you mean to disable it in the BIOS?

I just tried the command 'chkdsk /f' in the command prompt and received the following
'The type of the file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive. Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is write protected.
 
Did you do the chkdsk on the Vista partition ?
The syntax for directing it to the right place is in the link I included.
I don't understand your reference of a solitary dual HDD ?
If there are 2 separate HDD bays in your PC, eject the other one while you try the repair on the Vista disk.
 
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