Windows Vista Recovery problems

Hi, First off all thanks for the info on your blogs. I love it.

My Gateway PC started giving me the Blue Screen BSOD after the powercord slipped out as I was rebooting it. I made the recovery disk i got from your forum and it started booting from CD, however when I clicked repair computer, my OS which i think is Windows Vista Home Premium, my OS does not show. This is how it should look



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But it doesnt. Instead there is no OS for me to select. Anyone encountered this problem and is there a solution for it? I read on the forum that there is a cmd line to go around this problem but I dont know how to do that. Please help me guys. Thanks
 
Hi Sam, welcome to NST.
This sometimes happens if you have multiple HDDs, and the recovery disk gets confused about where to look for Vista, especially (but not always) if the HDD configuration is a mixture of new SATA and old IDE disks.
Disconnect any other HDDs before running the repair and that might remove the problem.
If you don't have multiple HDDs, try replying "next" without selecting the (non appearing) Vista system.
That will also sometimes do the 1st stage of the repair, causing Vista to magically reappear.
You then need to do the repair again, probably 3 times in all, before Vista will reboot unaided.
This all applies if it is your boot process that's broken, and not more fundamental damage to the OS caused by disconnecting the power as the HDD was in the middle of I/O.
In the latter case, boot the recovery CD, but don't select "startup repair" from the 2nd screen. Select "Command Prompt" to enter the recovery console, and from there run a chkdsk /f against your Vista partition. You'll find the syntax described here.
Hopefully that will find and fix any bad blocks damaged during the power cut.
 
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