Help with friend's laptop

[bige420]

Alright, my friends laptop has some problems. It wont boot into windows. When I start windows normally, it loads for a while then it just goes black and sits there. If I try to go into safe mode it loads for a while, the start button shows up in the corner then it just freezes at the loading screen. The closest thing I can come to getting into windows is booting into safe mode with command prompt. The command prompt shows up and is fully functional, I can type explorer in and the toolbar at the bottom shows up but I cant push anything on it. Is there any commands I can put in to, i dont know, start it up somehow. Thanks.

 

[aford10]

Try booting off an OS disc into the repair console. Use the fixboot command to repair the boot files.

 

[bige420]

Yeah unfortunately I don't have access to her vista disk. I'm not very familiar with vista, does it have it have something like windows repair?

 

[aford10]

It has restore points, but you have to be able to get into windows to use them.

If you can get into safe mode w/ command prompt, try this
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304449

 

[bige420]

Thats for XP, would it be the same for vista?

 

[bige420]

I fixed it dont worry about it.

 

[aford10]

Thanx for the vote......What was the final verdict?

 

[bige420]

There was a system recovery thing I could do by hitting F11 at startup and it would just reformat it for me without a disk or anything. I was a bit skeptical at first but it worked out fine. Not sure if it fully deleted the other partition though...but it works fine and my friends happy.

 

[aford10]

That's a built in restore partition. It works just like having restore discs. It will return the main partition back to factory condition.

 

[Zoron]

You don't need to boot into Windows to use system restore... you can access it by booting from the Vista DVD. You need to run Startup Recovery.

 

[bige420]

Yeah I ran startup recovery and it said it couldnt repair it automatically or something. Also, she never made a restore point because shes fails at life.

 

[aford10]

^ lol, harsh.

 

[Zoron]

If you have System Restore enabled, it will create it's own restore points... no need to do it manually.

 

[bige420]

Apparently she didnt, so I just had to reformat.