Windows Vista Boot Solution? Help me please...

invisiblelandscape

invisiblelandscape

Member
Hi,

When I start my Toshiba Satellite series laptop running 32bit Windows Vista I get the following error message:

Windows has encountered a problem communicating with a device connected to your computer. This error can be caused by unplugging a removable storage device such as an external USB drive while the device is in use, or by faulty hardware such as a hard drive or CD-ROM drive that is failing. Make sure any removable storage is properly connected and then restart your computer.
If you continue to receive this error message, contact the hardware manufacturer.

File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc00000e9
Info: An unexpected I/O error has occurred.

When I connect (or disconnect) my WD external harddrive and reboot, I get the same message. I downloaded a torrent called vista recovery disc (vista recovery disc.iso), and burned it onto a CD so that I could boot into advanced options. Booting from that CD brought me back to the same screen (the "Windows Boot Manager" screen) and the computer will not boot into the advanced boot options from the F8 command (so that I could start it in safe mode or do a system repair). What do I do from here? Is it possible that I botched the creation of my recovery disc? I would like to be able to access my files and copy some of them before I do a full system restore with the factory disc that Toshiba supplied me with when I bought the machine. Is this possible or am I doomed to FULL RECOVERY without saving my data? Thank you very much for you time and responses

Any suggestions?
 
Did you see a "press any key to boot from CD" message when you booted the PC with the recovery disk in the tray ?
If not, your BIOS isn't set to boot from CD before HDD, and you need to change it to do so.
Then boot the CD, select "repair your computer", then "startup repair".
Repeat the above line as many times as necessary to fix all aspects of the broken boot (up to three probably)
Should you need to rescue data in the event that your OS is ultimately unfixable without a factory reset, you can do so as described here, after downloading yourself a free Linux live-distro.
 
Hi Terry60,

Thank you so much for the response. I have begun to figure out how to manage my computer thanks to your help. I was able to run the vista repair disc, but it was unable to repair my start up files. I then burned a copy of Ubuntu as a way of extracting my files from the corrupt hard drive/system.

Everything was going great until I chose Places \ Computer from the Ubuntu menu expecting to find my hard drive listed, but instead only saw Ubuntu's "filesystem" drive. Is there a way that I can mount my laptops hard drive so that Ubuntu recognizes it, or does this mean that my hard drive is broken and unreachable in this way? When the laptop runs now there is a clicking noise that I belive is the hard drive trying to spin properly and failing. Any thoughts?

Thank you and much appreciated
 
Look in the BIOS to see if the HDD SMART reports problems (if you've enabled it).
You should be able to get a bootable disk-check utility from your HDD manufacturers website, to give it a thorough health check.
 
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