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

The Natural Philosopher[_2_]

Dave Headley wrote:
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.

OK..then what its is probably having issues with is that it needs
drivers for the hardware that are not in the live CD. At which point you
are off the 'simply boot a live CD' and into hackers paradise.

May I make a pragmatic suggestion?

Buy a new disk and either install a FULL linux or a FULL windows on it,
and then jumper the old disk as a slave to get the data off it.

This will get your old data back, and you will have to reinstall all the
programs.

I am tempted to say go Linux, and reinstall windows and its programs in
a virtual machine: After crashing several times a week ago my VM windows
refused to boot in under 45 minutes. I went back to an earlier snapshot,
and now its fine.

Sine no use data is actually held in the windows area whatsoever, by
deliberate choice - I regard windows as an unstable OS and will only use
it as a program launcher for three programs I need - this is no big deal
for me.

Unless your favourite windows programs are gaes, which are a bit sick in
a VM, this is definitely the way to get stability - move email,
browsing, word processing and the like to Linux, and leave - in my case
Rhino CAD and Corel suite running on a virtual machine..

Or dual boot the thing and use a local server to hold all the important
data.