Start-Up Repair will NOT work. Will not boot Vista.

[PleaseHelpASAP]

I have an Acer Extensa laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium installed. Its been working great for over a year now untill yesterday when all of a sudden it wouldn't boot up properly. It continued to go to start-up repair, but that kept on failing. After trying all other tools, (system restore had no restore points for some odd reason)... I tried safe mode. That did not work. It instead went back to the start-up repair screen. The same warning message popped up everytime it failed "Cannot repair automatically, click finish blah blah blah". When I bought this laptop from Best Buy, I did not recieve any type of Disk for Vista, it was already loaded on there... I would rather not do a clean install and hope there is another way to fix this. Thank you.

That is a common problem with Vista. There are several things that you can
do BEFORE reverting to a PC Recovery from the recovery partition.

1 - Boot from Bart PE (or other like CD) to run a chkdsk /f on your drive

2 - Remove your drive and place in an external USB enclosure and run chkdsk
/r on the drive from another computer

3 - Download and run the Vista Recovery CD and run it on your computer.

No it's not.

[PleaseHelpASAP]

Just checked and the "chkdsk/f" will not work on command prompt, says drive is in use and instead of booting up at start up repair continues to come up.

I most sincerely hope you have backed up your important files.
In order to try to determine if this is a hardware or a software problem you
can try a bootable CD, a good example of which is Ubuntu.
If you cannot boot to the desktop in Ubuntu then you have a serious hardware
issue.
If you can boot into Ubuntu (I am not advocating Linux for anyone but an OS
bootable from a CD has its uses) see if you can read your hard drive: I do
not think you will be able to read your hard drive but I hope so for your
sake.

Then why do so many people have it???? Uncommon would be very few have it.
Take a look at the posts many in this newsgroup have the problem. That is
also why there are so many places to get the fix from...

Where did you run chkdsk from? What did you boot from?

[Unknowning]

I have the same problem and I did everything specified above, I ran chkdsk/f from vista's recovery cd that I downloaded and it changed nothing. I'm at a dead end here I don't want to have to reinstall vista and my drivers.

[ChadM]

I know this is a bit late in the game for a reply, but I was browsing the forums here to find a solution to a similar problem with my sister in law's Toshiba laptop that is using Vista. For an unknown reason, her system kept booting up the Start Repair function that kept failing. So, we clicked on the advanced functions that appear when the repair fails and allows you to go to command prompt as one of the options. We, too, tried chkdsk /f which didn't do much. However, when I tried chkdsk /r, the system went through the hard drive for almost 2 hours, finding and isolating damaged clusters. Once that was completed, we were able to boot her computer normally.

Hope this experience helps someone!