Vista won't boot

[Cheetz007]

I think I did a bad thing!

My friend brought a laptop around to my house with windows vista installed on it but it wasn't booting up - it did the POST and then went to a blank screen. I couldn't get it to boot into safe mode or anything.

So, after some hours of trying various different things to no avail, me being stupid, I booted it up using a windows XP install disk that I happened to have floating about, went into the recovery console and did a CHKDSK /F (I think).

Have I completely knackered the installation or is there any hope at all?

I have since read up on the subject and I now realise that Vista is very different from it's predecessors! I don't have a bootable Vista install disk although I do have a bootable startup repair disk.

I'm not sure where to even start which is why I haven't provided any details - not too sure what details I should be providing. If anyone could help I'd be very appreciative.

Just tell me what I need to tell you?!!!

[Rudra.J]

May be the Vista installation has lost its track to find the MBR so it doesn't boot, you however need a Vista Bootable Disk to repair your existing Os installed on your lappy. The best way if your lappy is still under warranty would be to contact the customer care...

[DigitalPrimate]

Running CHKDSK from XP should not kill Vista. Technically you could run CHKDSK from Win2000 and it shouldn't kill Vista. All use FAT32 or NTFS for file allocation and all three versions are aware of how to correctly check the drives for issues. If you had run FIXMBR or some other commands, that might cause some problems for you. Your particular issue is probably due to a startup configuration issue in Vista, opposed to disk corruption. You are going to have to find a Vista DVD to make things right. Once you locate one and boot up off it, choose Repair Installation. Vista will usually say that it has found problems affecting startup and do you want to repair. That should take care of it, if the problem is superficial. If it still won't boot after that, then you will probably have to do a complete Repair of the OS using the Vista DVD. This should be able to correct any boot issues without losing any of the existing data on the machine.

If you have a VISTA Recovery Disc that is the right version (32-bit or 64-bit) you should be able to use that to at least perform some basic repair. If you are not sure what you have, you could try downloading a fresh image from:. With this disc, you can access the Vista Recovery Center and at least try doing a few steps from it. You can not do a full Repair so if the Recovery Center says it can't fix the issue, then you will still have to locate a Vista DVD.

HTH