Stuck in Startup Repair w/o OS listed

[Myra]

I was trying to do Startup Repair in my laptop but something went wrong with it, after selecting language when it asked me for driver, for running Startup Repair, i din't see any driver listed. I simply tried skipping that part and proceeding with the repairing process, everything after that appeared fine but when i rebooted my system then i got a blue screen. I waited for some minutes after which i got a message box asking me to select language. In short my system is running in to start up repair loop now,I think it is so because i am skipping driver installation part but how will i point the process to install it as it i don't see them in list. I will like to know if i am going wrong any where or if there is anything that i can try out.

[rossen]

Don't know why but your situation makes me feel as if there is some kind of hardware issue in your system. If you would have a system then i would have suggested you to check out the hardware components by opening cpu but as you are having a laptop i think you should better get it checked from service center.

[Myra]

I was getting same feeling, i have gone through same Startup Repair process several times but as i have mentioned it is running in a loop. Forcing down system to shutdown and restarting it is just not making any difference. I don't have much idea about hardware's so i wont be messing with my laptop. I don't mind getting it checked from service center but i have kept it as my last option until this weekend. So if there is anything else that i can check out or try out then do let me know. It will be very appreciative, Thanks in advance.

[Zachary]

Rather than going through the same process again and again, i will suggest you to try out "command line option" at same place, You can try running below bootrec commands and check out if you are getting any luck with that. Just enter then one by one and hit enter after every command.
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd

[SpearMan]

If that doesn't work and if you are having a restore point created then you can try doing system restore. I think trying out that would be a better idea. If it is due to some kind of software issue then you will surely get it fixed but if it is an hardware than system restore wont help. Just go through system restore process and check out if you are having a restore point save. If not then you can very well get it fixed from service center, best of luck.

[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.