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[SOLVED]Vista Help Pls - Bad Install (and then some!)

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Shane:
When vista breaks, it breaks hard lol

A repair install is going to be a must, but not from those outdated recovery disks that will put everything back to the way it was when you got the computer, and would be horribly outdated.

Doing a proper repair install would be far better, not have any of the preinstalled crap on it and will let you keep your files. it is basically doing an upgrade to the same version

This is the guide to do it
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/88236-repair-install-vista.html

The draw back, you need a vista setup cd that has SP2 already on it. That isnt easy to find. I do have it the disk but obviously I cant post it or MS would have a fit lol

But there are ways of finding a good ISO to download (ISO is a cd image), but we will worry about that later.

First thing to do, if it hasnt been done already is to test some hardware to make sure it isnt the cause. Otherwise the repair install will go like crap or worse.

So if you havent yet we need to check the disk for bad sectors to make sure that isnt the problem.

Open a cmd.exe window as administrator if you can and put this in

chkdsk c: /r

The /r tells chkdsk to do a normal chkdsk and also a bad sector check, 5 stages total and will take a while!

Then when it is done you can find the results of it this way
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/96938-check-disk-chkdsk-read-event-viewer-log.html

Post the results for me so i can make sure it says 0KB in bad sectors at the bottom. Anything above 0 means its time for a new drive.

Then we need to test the ram (memory) to make sure that isnt what is causing the problem. There are multiple test programs out there, like mem test 4 but I have had it not report any problems on a system that only the windows memory test could find. So I like to use it instead. But ms removed it from their site but you can still find it :-)

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/microsoft_windows_memory_diagnostic.html

That you will use to create an bootable cd with and then boot off the cd itself to run the test. You may need to make the cd on a more stable system of course.

Then if both the drive and memory are good then we will do the repair install. When we get to that point I will work with you to try and find a normal vista sp2 iso for you to download.

1 am for me so I may not reply till tomorrow or monday.

Shane

RaveRocks:
Here is the results of the chkdsk I performed last evening:

====NOTE: reformatted to make it easier to read====

Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is HP.

A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.                         
255808 file records processed.
562 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
0 EA records processed.
159 reparse records processed.
311072 index entries processed.
0 unindexed files processed.
255808 security descriptors processed.
Cleaning up 14028 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 14028 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 14028 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is compacting the security descriptor stream...
27633 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
34406680 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
255792 files processed.
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
1454787 free clusters processed.
Free space verification is complete.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

51199968 KB total disk space.
44912816 KB in 197102 files.
110292 KB in 27636 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
357712 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
5819148 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
12799992 total allocation units on disk.
1454787 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
40 e7 03 00 ec 6d 03 00 32 1e 06 00 00 00 00 00  @....m..2.......
32 02 00 00 9f 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  2...............
42 00 00 00 12 72 1c 77 f8 81 0d 00 f8 79 0d 00  B....r.w.....y..

I'll post the results of my memory test in a bit.

=== edit 01 ===

I ran both the standard and extended memory tests (2 passes each) and no errors were found.  As soon as I send this, I'm going to reboot and let the extended memory tests run overnight while my body sleeps and my brain resets. 

By the way, in my search for answers, I found another download from HP that looked like it could solve my F11 Recovery functionality, but it didn't perhaps because it was written for an HP laptop running a different version of Windows.  The cmd file didn't complain about any of that when run.  I'm attaching the cmd file and log file it created when I ran it a few times.   Other files in the package: HPRMF.dll, winre32.wim, winre664.wim and SP48415.cva. 

Julian:
Hmmm hps the newer ones you have to hit esc first then it will pop up an alternative menu for you to recover with f11

Shane:
Letting the memory test run for as long as possible is the best way to test it.

How did that go?

Shane

Rick:
For a long while, when I used vista, the only program I used to maintain it was 360

many of the updates from MSFT put bugs in the vista systems now :(
force them to re-install to verify the license to only get a bad license report back after DAYS of TRYING to restore!

regards

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