Vista Recovery Disk Issues

C

cpthomas

Member
Hi,
I have an HP Pavilion desktop that is not booting, showing Err1 Err3. I paid for and downloaded the Vista Recovery CD. Burned the CD with IMGBurn as suggested.

When I boot from disk, first it goes to a black screen with a white meter at the bottom with Loading Files above it. After that reaches 100%, I get a screen with Microsoft logo and a revolving green meter showing it loading. The screen then goes black and goes no further, sometimes with an oversized mouse cursor visible.

Not sure what's going on, but I can't even get to a menu screen for Vista repair or anything.

Any help is appreciated..


- Cameron
 
It sounds like there is something wrong with your hard disk. We've seen cases like this either in scenarios where the MBR is damaged or the drive is physically damaged. Those are pretty much the only two cases where even Windows from a CD will load then freeze.
 
If you're happy to fish around inside your PC with the power on (entirely at your own risk, no responsibility taken here !), then you could try unplugging the power supply from the HDD before booting the CD and seeing if it will complete initializing into command prompt, then hot-plug the HDD power and see if a chkdsk /r can find (and fix hopefully) any dodgy sectors on the HDD.
Chances are that the booted-CD OS environment isn't clever enough to detect new hardware, but you appear to have a catch 22 situation where anything might be worth a try.
If all else fails, use this technique to rescue your user data before resorting to a factory reset.
Linux CDs don't try to check out the HDD as they boot the way the MS repair disc does, so it will reach a useable OS regardless of the state of your HDD.
You can also find 3rd party bootable partition managers which will enable you to run a chkdsk.
 
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