DIYbanter - View Single Post - Packard Bell computer driving me crazy!!!! Help!

Dave Headley

In article , lid says...

Dave Headley wrote:
In article ,
says...
On 29/09/2011 14:16, Dave Headley wrote:
In articlewbednVxgMaaUxhnTnZ2dnUVZ8hednZ2d@brightvie w.co.uk,
says...
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 is indeed a "Repair your computer" option but selecting that just
leads to a black screen for about 2 seconds then it reboots, sometimes
blue-screening for a fraction of a second (enough to know it's a BSOD
but not long enough to read it). Just spoken to my mate and he only has
a recovery DVD anyway, not a full install DVD.
You might be able to turn off the auto restart from the advanced boot
options screen. That may give you a chance to read the error message.

After that you may have to resort to lower level file repairs etc under
Bart PE.

It sounds like the best bet may be to do a fresh install onto a new
hard drive, and then set about recovery of files from the old.

Thanks John, I think you're right there. Just tried with a Knoppix CD
and it shows "Decompressing Linux..... Parsing ELF....Done.....Booting
kernel....." and then it goes no further, just sticks there.

Hmm.

Sugggets some mighty borked hardware to me..RAM good?

Yep, I put it into my machine and ran Memtest86+ overnight without
errors.