Vista boot failure

[Appleby]

I had a customer who brought in a Dell desktop computer with Vista Ultimate installed and it won't boot. All she says is that it stopped booting one day. From what I've read, this could have something to do with a Service Pack being installed but I'm not sure?

Basically it appears to boot properly, I get the Vista loading animation and then it goes to a black screen that starts checking files of some sort. In my ignorance, I don't know exactly what it's doing but the files numbers start scrolling up very fast as it appears to be checking them. It then hangs at 9571/95557 with this error message flashing VERY fast... !! oxc01a001d !! (\Registry\Machine\Components). Does anyone have any idea what this is or how to repair it?

The pc will not boot into safe mode, the startup repair says it fixes it, but it does this same thing every time. Also I've got her original Vista disc but it does not have a SP on it, therefore the Repair feature is disabled when booting from the disc. I don't have an Ultimate disc with the SP(s) on it.

Thoughts?

 

[NYJimbo]

That's a failed Service Pack update screen. Service Pack 1 is notorious for failing this way on some Dell's (maybe all machines, but so far I only get them on Dell's).

Unfortunatly 90% of the time it cannot be fixed.

You can do alot of googling, you might get lucky, but I have seen this before and so far have never been able to fix it.

 

[Appleby]

Thanks Jimbo, I did some more Googling and like you said, that is what it looks like and the hope of recovery is slim to none. The customer is pretty put out with her computer anyway and said if it wasn't an easy fix, she would trash it and buy a new one. I saw alot of people with the same problem posting questions online but the answers ranged from absurd to silly for the most part. I wanted to get some experts advice. I appreciate the help sir.

 

[Vakman]

This is one of the harder fixes. I recommend you recover her files from a LiveCD or other methods if you wish and either reinstall her OS or like you mentioned sell her a new PC if she really wanted.
You can't even get into Safe Mode?

 

[NYJimbo]

Yeah, for some reason I have only seen it on Dells, but I know other people are getting it on all kinds of machines. I thought maybe it was something to do with Dells proprietary files or troubleshooting stuff or drivers but thats not it. It is a pretty rare failure though. I actually caused it once on a SP install so I saw it all the way through.

What it appears to be is right after SP1 gets done and it does its shutdown it then reboots and spews out some crap about "Dont shut down the machine, doing part 1 of 3" or something and then the screen goes black and starts incrementing a counter and listing file names. At some point it produces an hex code error about some log space not being big enough (but its rolled off the right side of the screen) and then just does that forever.

One time I tried to fix it for several days, doing all kinds of registry tweaks and deleting files and replacing othes trying to fool Vista that either the SP was really failed and it should back out or that it was done and it should just come up but just ended up with BSODS or black screens.

In the end I gave up and went for an OS reload.

 

[Appleby]

Jimbo....it's a Dell. How weird is that? I think it's an E510, I'm not sure because it's at my office and I'm at home.

The customer brought in the machine a month or two ago with a dead HD. I replaced it and installed Vista Ultimate she'd bought (org. had XP). The customer asked me to just install the OS and she'd do all the updates. She doesn't use her computer much, so I'm not sure how long it took her to get around to doing the updates, but she brought it into me and told me it wasn't booting.

She's not interested in spending any money on the machine, so I bet she just trashes it and goes with a new pc. I'll quote her a fresh install and this time I'll do all the SP updates for her, but again, I think she's going to say "forget it."

I was just hoping there was some easy fix.lol Oh and no, it won't boot into Safe Mode. I just wish I could do a repair install like would be easy in XP.

 

[vdub12]

I was just hoping there was some easy fix.lol Oh and no, it won't boot into Safe Mode. I just wish I could do a repair install like would be easy in XP.

XP is nice because you can repair install SP3 with SP0 and just reinstall your service packs.