Will not boot past welcome screen

Disconnect the HDD, reset the board and turn on the PC again.

I will try this as soon as possible. I'm hoping he's not busy tonight. /crossfingers

If you have an OS disc, boot into the repair console. At the command line, type fixboot

Ok so I tried it out.....disconnected the hard drive, took the cmos battery out to reset the motherboard and put them back together then turned on the pc. Did not work...still booted up to the welcome screen and hung there.

He did mention something about windows updates. He had tried turning it on again this morning and it came back saying that it was finishing up installing updates. But it never went anywhere, hung at "installing 3/3 updates, do not shut down" I don't know why it only did this once. He thinks he has/had windows updates set to automatic download/install...that is if this has any significance to my problem.

So what I am thinking right now, if nobody else has any more suggestions, is that I go to my college bookstore and try to get a full install of windows vista for ~$30 with a free upgrade to windows 7 (idk for sure as to how much it is or if its comes with an upgrade).

Then, reload the whole computer and call it good.

Let me know if you guys have any other ideas and if reloading the OS will do the trick (I'm assuming it will, but do not want to go that far).

Thanks.

Instead of reinstalling windows, try the fixboot option in the repair console. If that doesn't work, try chkdsk /r

That would be after i get ahold of a windows vista full install cd?

Oops didnt read your comment above the one i posted...guess that answers my question.

So yeah, it might be a day or two till i get the vista cd...gotta run it by him and hes gotta decide whether or not if he wants it now or if hes gunna just buy 7.

I'll keep you guys posted either way.

Gunna be getting the vista cd today if the bookstore has any in. They didnt have any in stock on Thursday/Friday therefore i couldnt try this over the weekend.

^Try too with the chkdsk /fix mbr.....

Yup, friend is busy all week and most of the weekend. So I will be attempting this (hopefully) on Sunday this weekend.

Thanks guys.

These are 2 separate commands. The fixmbr isn't a valid switch off the chkdsk command.

Ok, I guess my stupid college didn't have the right kind of Windows Vista cd. It was a Vista Business Upgrade cd with the "upgrade" option greyed out. So, even with me trying to get to the repair console, I couldn't.

I ended up blowing out his hd then making a new partition/installing Vista.

One last thing.... So at the end of the install it asks for a user name and password (of course). I tell my friend to enter in whatever he wants. He does, I then go and update/install programs.

I start putting on my coat and tell him to restart...it does, he starts typing a password. It kept saying wrong password. He forgot what his password was that he originally entered.... how ironic is that?? Haha.

Does anybody have insight on how to crack a password protected user account? It is the only user account on there. I have not looked around online yet because I have not had the time to do this.

Thank you.

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Yes your right, my mistake, the correct command is:

fdisk /mbr

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofthetrade/tp/passre...

Ok, so I am going to try a few of these free password cracking software tools. All I gotta do is burn them to a cd then boot off of it. Hopefully it won't take too long and I don't have to worry about it any more.

Tried the first one... Ophcrack. It worked flawlessly except for the fact that it could not figure out my friends password. The OS on the CD i created worked just fine.

I ended up reloading his OS on the hd, again. Except this time around his wireless adapter does not want to play nicely with the driver... one thing after another  

I will be checking out their website to see if they have an updated driver for it.

If I didn't already tell you guys this...

Thank you for your suggestions!

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey