Yesterday, my Compaq Presario (running 32 bit Vista Home Premium) laptop stopped booting. Just a black screen. Tapping F8 to access safe mode does nothing. Just the same black screen. I can get to the BIOS, and I did initiate a HD Diagnostics test from there. It failed. And provided no repair or usable diagnostic information. I can boot using a Microsoft Vista disk, but when I use the repair option and get to the screen which should display the OS I wish to repair, it is empty. I have used multiple tools to try to correct the problems: Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 Winternals 2005 ERD Seagate HD Diagnostics Memtest86 Ubuntu as well as the MS Vista DVD All of these products seem to be rendered totally useless if the PC fails to detect an OS. Shouldn't there some sort of process that I can run to get rid of problems on my OS, even if the computer fails to recognize that there is an OS? The SeaTools disk always displays the hard drive on the laptop, but the long test eventually tells me that it cannot repair the problems that it's found. From the command prompt (accessed using the install disk), I cannot get to my C: drive, the drive that has Windows installed on it. I get a msg "Data error (cyclic redundancy check)". Without a C: drive I can't really use fixboot or fixmbr or chkdsk /f or scannow. Startup repair (MS Vista disk) runs almost forever, finally indicating that I should restart the PC. The restart give me an error on the file \Windows\System32\Winload.exe with a status of 0xc000000f. System Restore won't work without an OS selected. I don't even think I can use my USB caddy to pull about a month's worth of pictures and documents that have not been backed up. I don't believe it's engineered to to used with the hard drive of a laptop. Am I in the position of having to reinstall Vsta on a laptop that was working perfectly a few days ago?
In my original post I mentioned using Ubuntu as a tool to correct and/or recover files. I used Ubuntu 8.10 and it failed to find my hard drive. I'll be glad to dload 10.10 if you think it will do a better job of drive detection. I haven't come across a tool yet that will help if the Vista disk fails to recognize an OS.
you can buy an adapter that connects the laptop drive to usb on another pc. newegg and tigerdirect both stock them, for 20 -25 dollar range. You also might try to find a copy of spinrite on the torrents or usenet. it is a boot disk that scans your harddrive and attempts to repair it. for more info go to grc.com (Gibson Research Corporation).
This is just wonderful... I say 'screw it' to saving the documents that have not been backed up, put the trustworthy Vista Install disk in the laptop and click on install. After entering the product code and accepting the license terms, it tells me that 'Upgrade has been disabled. To upgrade start the installation from Windows'. What a bunch of wankers. If I could upgrade from within Windows, I'd still have a windows installation, and I wouldn't have to upgrade. So okay I can't upgrade, and since I'd already decided to forego saving anything, I clicked on Custom Install. It originally displayed 2 partitions. I clicked on drive options, deleted both partitions, clicked on New, let Windows apply the size setting, then formatted the drive. On the first step, while the Copying Windows hasn't budged past 0%, I get a message: 'Windows setup could not reinitialize the deployment engine. To install Windows, restart the installation'. More wankering shrouded in obfuscation. 'Deployment Engine' my ass. Bulls**t code for 'something went wrong but we won't tell you what it is'. Well, there's obviously no point in restarting the installation since I'll only achieve the same results. I even tried to use an old XP install disk to see if I could reformat from that puppy. No joy there either. What now? Download some other godforsaken tool that I have to burn to a disk?