Stuck in Startup Repair w/o OS listed

Hello to the computer gods,
I am using Windows Vista Home Premium and it has been running
great until this morning when I tried to turn on my computer. It took
forever just to get
me to a random blue screen where it then stalled and about ten minutes
later a box came up and asked me which language I would like to use.
Since Wookie was not listed I settled for English. Then another few
minutes went by until my computer painfully popped up another box asking
which driver I would like to select so that I could run Startup Repair.
However, there aren't any drivers listed! What do I do from here? I have
a tendency to push the big button that says launch so I just clicked
next without selecting any drivers (mostly because there weren't any to
choose from). It then began Startup Repair, hooray! But hours went by
and finnaly I came home from work and it was finally done repairing. It
said it repaired everything and all I needed to do was restart and
everything would be just fine and dandy. But was it? Well, that's where
you fit in oh great computer gods. Will you answer my prayers? What
should I do? Possibly a mouse sacrafice? A computer mouse that is...

It sounds like hardware failure. You can try and troubleshoot this yourself
if you have the skills.

If the computer is still under warranty, contact the mftr.'s tech support.

Testing hardware failures often involves swapping out suspected parts with
known-good parts. If you can't do the testing yourself and/or are
uncomfortable opening your computer, take the machine to a professional
computer repair shop (not your local equivalent of
BigComputerStore/GeekSquad).

Thank you! I am glad you had such a fast response, but it seems my fears
are realized, I will probably have to take this laptop to a professional
so I don't do anymore damage to it. With my luck if I tried tampering
with any hardware the next time I turned it on it would probably open a
wormhole in the time space continuum and cause everything we know to
cease in existence. Thanks you for your help though! If anyone has any
last minute ideas let me know.

It's a wise person who knows his/her limitations. Thank you for not opening
a wormhole. The last one was really hard to get rid of.

What intrigued me was this: You say you ran Startup Repair and it told you
it completed successfully. And at that point you posted to this thread
without telling us what happened when you restarted! It begs the question
what on earth happened when you restarted??????? In fact--did Startup Repair
repair DoubleJay's box?????? I dunno from what you've written. Malke says
it smells like a hdw problem to him, but it always seems to smell like a hdw
problem to Malke with all respect due because Malke posts a lot of good
advice except when every BSOD/Stop makes Malke think hdw problem.

1) Statistically the vast majority of blue screens, stop errors, black
screens, XP, Vista, and Windows 7 RTM and every other build no starts,
stalls at the Welcome Screen (Win 7 RTM has some of them in store for
people) are SOFTWARE problems rather than hardware problems.

2) You havenothing to lose by trying to fix a software problem and certainly
only minutes to invest in time.

3) Malke has a good hardware check guide, and you can check your hadware and
connections easily if you're using a desktop (you didn't say).

3) I don't know if you received a stop error, but they are often nebulous as
to the cause--the differential diagnosis can be non-specifically wide, and
many of them can point to mixed hdw or software errors. Again, the vast
majority are software errors.

In addition to Startup Repair, you can try the command line option at the
same place, and try to run the bootrec commands to see if they get you
fixed.

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd

You also have System Restore availabe as one of the repair options listed if
you have a restore point that's appropriate, and system restore was on.

Thank you for responding to my post, and for your insightful points.
To answer your question of what I had not described concerning the
effects the Startup Repair had after my laptop had assured me it had
fixed itself, the computer restarted and again came to the same blue
screen asking me which language I would like to choose. Again I chose
English, and it brought me back to the same place I was before at the
pop up of some box that wanted me to pick an operating system, but to no
avail because none were listed again. The only way I figured out how to
get to the next box where I could choose from a list of Repair
accessories including Startup Repair, System Restore, Command Prompt,
etc., was because I had simply pressed next without selecting an
operating system and I selected Startup Repair. I have used the System
Restore before and brought a computer back from the grave, and I figured
I could do the same this time. I selected System Restore from this list,
but it gave me some message about how it couldn't work because it had no
restore points to restore to. This is eerie because I am certain my
laptop does and has created restore points. It struck me as if saying
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" and now I am considering
naming my laptop HAL, that is of course by some magic it emerges from
it's current state of a paper-weight. I did not receive a stop error
from the computer at anytime. I agree whole-heartedly with you, I don't
have anything to loose from checking to see if those Bootrec commands
will work. I did however try what the computer suggested when I clicked
on System Restore (that I should type in some command to restore it) I
am certain I typed it in correctly, but again the computer did nothing.
Hopefully this new information might shed some light as to what the
problem might be, and I warmly welcome any further diagnosis. Thank you
once again.

[mtwrangler]

I've had a similar experience with Vista. A friend brought me a Dell 1760 laptop that froze up while she was watching a video on it. She pushed and held the power button to reboot it, and it came up with the Vista repair screen. Clicking repair, it went a long time, then reboots back to same screen. Clicking the only other option, "Start Normally", would begin the boot process, show the Vista progress bar, show a cursor mouse arrow for a period of time, then go to a blue screen of death. Unlike XP or previous versions, the Stop Error gave no details, only of "Unknown origins".

Common sense says that a machine that freezes, then is powercycled, the machine probably has any or all of the following:
corrupted system files, corrupted registry,corrupted drivers, bad or corrupted partition tables, bad sectors on the hard drive needing a chkdsk, boot sector/mbr issues, etc.

Because it was able to show anything pertaining to Vista, i.e. mouse pointer, Microsoft logo, etc, indicated that it had passed POST, the bios was working, and the harddrive was still functional to the degree that it wasn't completely dead in the water.

So hitting F8 at boot brings up the startup choices. I attempted to start in SAFE mode, it got a hair farther, showing the color of the Vista background, not just the black logo boot background, then it crashed/rebooted, a cycle it would continue to do when it hit what ever the "bad" spot was.

I attempted to boot from the "Last Known Good Configuration" which would load a previous backup of ControlSet002 from the registry, which would be the control set that last successfully loaded windows drivers and services. A shot in the dark, because if Safe Mode didnt work, the odds of this working was negligible.

After this I attempted to boot into Safe Mode with Command Prompt hoping to do a chkdsk to fix the harddrive. No Joy. Would not go anywhere, show anything, no prompt, no screen, nothing, just another crash/reboot.

I knew Dell has a Restore Partition, DSR on their newer laptops, but I didn't want to attempt to invoke that (via Ctrl+F11 at boot time) as I wasn't sure which version of this utility was available on this machine. The early version wipes drives completely, restoring the machine to factory new, and that would have wiped my friends personal data.
A very good and comprehensive site on Dell's DSR recovery partition is at this site:

My friend, as they all do, misplaced her restore disk. She did bring one from her sister's Dell laptop that was purchased around the same time frame but from a totally different model machine. Ugh. Well, Nothing ventured, nothing gained....
She'd attempted a repair/reinstall from this before she came to me, but because the bios default boot order must be goofy, the dvd drive was set to boot after the hdd, so her attempt failed because it would boot into the corrupted original OS and cycle. I changed the order,(F12 for full bios access, F2 for basic boot order) booted off the dvd, and when Setup appeared, chose the Repair option.

A screen appears eventually that is supposed to show the partitions with windows installations available to repair, but it couldn't detect any so that was blank.
So I rebooted to the dvd, ran the Setup to do an Install. That did detect a previous version of windows, offered to move that into a folder called Windows.old.
Having done that, widows began installing, then it detected the hard drive was corrupted and it ran a chkdsk. It found several issues and repaired them.
Windows Vista, steady by jerks, installed itself (but with all indications it wanted to fail by weird actions) and finally successfully completed.
It didn't ask for a serial number, it didn't talk about activation, and saved the previous version and files in C:\windows.old
It does boot up and give a 2 second flash showing two operating systems to choose from, then boots to the new Vista Os. Annoying but changing that in msconfig will cure that.
The machine is now working fine. Hope somebody can use this info.