Vista won't boot

S

Somerset_lad

Member
Help me please.....

Have a HP Pavilion A6220.uk with vista, trouble is it won't boot up, have downloaded the vista recovery disk and have burnt it using imgburn and it won't boot up onto cd, have gone into bios and made sure that the cd is selected before hd and still nothing. Have downloaded it a second time and also burnt 3 cd's.

If i hold F8 and try to boot in safe mode, this fails on \windows\system32\drivers\disk.sys.

I can't boot into safe mode with command prompt either.

I have no original cd's with this pc, if you can help it would be great.

Thank you :smile:
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hi neighbour, welcome to NST.
Download and burn a copy of Linux, and boot it in "don't alter my system" mode, to check that your RAM CDROM etc are all functional. It will also be useful to rescue your user data from the HDD should that prove necessary in the worst case scenario.
If that works OK, and our recovery disk boots on another fully functional PC so you're sure that it's OK too, post back.
Did you ever get the "hit any key to boot from CD" message when powering on with the CD in the tray ?
If not, that would suggest that you haven't burned the CD properly.
Verify it on another PC as suggested above, so that we can be sure exactly what it is needs to be fixed.
 
Hi Terry,

Thanks for your reply, it does come up with saying press any key to boot from cd, after that it says installing windows files, then the windows progress bar goes across the screen, changes to another window bar which keeps going round, but no window logo appears, then the screen goes blank, no recovery console appears.

Haven't tried linux yet, where can i download it from?

Cheers

Phil
 
Hi Terry, Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I have downloaded and made a linux cd, the pc boots from the linux cd no problems at all. I have also tried the vista recovery disk in another pc and it works fine.

Have you any suggestions as to what to try next?

Cheers

Phil
 
With Linux booted, using "places", you should see something like this if your Vista system is largely intact.
Does it look like you've still got the bulk of a Vista system on your HDD?
 
If you do navigate to where you store your important files, and copy them over to removeable media. You'll than need to delete all partitions on the drive and than re-install Windows.
 
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