On 29/09/2011 12:54, NT wrote:
On Sep 29, 12:48 pm, John wrote:
On 29/09/2011 11:56, Reentrant wrote:

On 28/09/2011 23:10, John Rumm wrote:

... You can
usually fix this by booting from the windows CD and doing an inplace
repair install.

For XP, yes - done it loads of times. But I don't think that's available
for Vista (or Win7); you have to do a clean OS install and then
reinstall all applications.
User Data is preserved in "windows.old".

Good point, did not spot the vista bit...

A repair install is still in theory possible, but under more restrictive
conditions.

The conditions:

You must have a full install DVD and not a product recovery DVD, it must
be the same or a later version than the product installed. So for
example if your system has been patched to SP2 and your DVD predates
that, then you have to burn yourself a slipstreamed SP2 DVD first.

Ideally you need to start the process from being already logged into an
admin privileged account, rather than from booting from the DVD. So if
you can't boot that far then this particular route is not much use!

Having said that, I would suggest doing a F8 boot (i.e. hitting F8 early
in the boot sequence as the BIOS is coming to the end of its bit). To
get to the Advanced Boot Options. See if there is a "Repair your
Computer" option there. You should then be able to get as far as the
system recovery options and choose startup repair.

There are some guides here that might help:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/88...up-repair.html

Linux is so much easier. Mint is easy for people with no linux
experience. Its Ubuntu with its niggles fixed.

I think this is the computing equivalent of sucking air in through your
teeth, and suggesting you should have bought a different car rather than
fixing the broken one!

The live CDs are handy for checking the fault boundary between hardware
and OS, and also possibly for data recovery from a non bootable drive
(assuming you can mount the file system). However that is not the same
as getting windows working again. You may well want to argue its
"better", but if that then means you can't access the applications you
need to do what you need to do, or work with your existing files, then
that is doubtful.



--
Cheers,

John.

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