Speedi6

I've got Vista Home Premium on my laptop. It came pre-installed with it
and has been rock stable, until last week's updates.

After the updates, it won't boot. It won't even boot in safe mode or
safe mode with command prompt or with last known good configuration. It
does the same in all cases -- it looks like's going to come up, I see
the mouse pointer and can move it some, but no desktop appears, then it
will spontaneously reboot. When it comes up next, it says Windows didn't
start up correctly.

I had an external mouse and keyboard connected, disconnected them. No
change. So, I went poking around the recovery tools on the DVD. I
couldn't find the DVD that came with my Toshiba laptop, but I have
another Vista Home Premium (Upgrade) DVD that I have and tried to use
it. I found a number of repair options.

The first was an automatic repair. It failed. So, I then tried the boot
repair. It found no errors. So, I tried to do restore point. It listed 3
possible restore points, but, it fails to be able to restore any of
them, saying the files are corrupt.

At this point, I was wondering about health of my drive, so, I opened a
command prompt and did a chkdsk /f /r on c. It found some minor errors
which it said it corrected. So I ran it again and it came back clean.
Tried to boot again, same results.

So, at this point, I figured that I could do an inplace reinstall. I've
done that with very good success with XP. But, even with all those
repair options on the Vista DVD, one that I could NOT find was to do an
repair inplace installation. If I would tell it to do an install, it
said it was going to rename the Windows directory and that the old
Windows installation would be unavailable.

So, the primary question I have is, can it be done? That is, can I do an
install on top of an existing installation that would (hopefully) fix
what's broke and keeping all my installed programs in place. As I said,
I've done that many times with success on XP.

I'm wondering if the problem might be that I had SP1 on my laptop but
the DVD I have is original release. Is that an issue? Or maybe the
problem is I don't have the right edition of the DVD? Or, maybe it just
isn't possible with Vista?

Any clues on next step? I'd rather not have to do a clean install. But,
if I have to, I'm going to put XP on it. I've simply never had an XP
installation fail to the point of being unrecoverable, unless the hard
drive died. In my case, my hard drive seems fine, based on my chkdsk
results.

dai

the only way i have found is to run the upgrade from within windows
make a slipstreamed and try with that
try tapping f8 and try
last known good configuration

Speedi6

Thanks for your response. As far as last known good configuration, I forgot to mention in my OP that I get the same results with that as well. This sorry sack of crud just won't boot no-how, no-way. Which I find very strange given that the hardware checks out okay as far as I can tell, and the computer had been rock solid reliable until last week's updates. And nobody else seems to be reporting disasterous results with that update.

As far as building a slipstreamed DVD, well, can it be done? With XP, the service packs have an integrate option to build a slipstreamed install disk. Vista SP1 does NOT have such an option. So, I don't know if there is a way to do it, unless there is a tool available to do it.

I wish I knew someone with a SP1 DVD, but, I haven't found anybody that does. I could maybe bittorrent one. I will if I get good information that it will do what I need, to reinstall in place.

Dusten04

did you re-format to XP? if you did you cant access the vista OS anymore.

Speedi6

No, I have not yet done anything drastic. I am considering reverting it to XP, but I haven't as yet. So, it is still in the state where it almost boots, and then resets. It does the same thing no matter what boot type option I choose, safe mode, last known good configuration, etc. So, I'm still trying to find confirmation as to whether or not Vista can do an in-place reinstall. If not, I'm going to XP. If so, then I need to find out how because I haven't been able to do so as yet.

dai

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/...ice-Pack.shtml
you can slipstream with vlite
scroll down to the bottom ver 1.6
http://www.vlite.net/download.html
run chkdsk /r