[cwr89]

So I am at a loss, one of my friends carries her laptop into my room, she is in tears because "something happened and it crash".
well 2 days latter that's still all she can tell me about it, it went blue and then now it doesn't start. Ok, so I've started looking into it. well Vista is a complete stage of computer life that I skipped. I stayed with XP until about a week ago and now I am on 7. Anyway I have found out the following. During boot the system hangs on crcdisk.sys. having googled the problem I have found that it could be potentially any one of 10000 hardware or software problems, it seems that the crcdisk is the standard catch-all hang code.

basically it won't load at all in any mode (believe me safe mode was the first thing I tried)
because I can't load I can't get to a recovery option.
I am in the process of finding a Vista home premium disk but in the mean time I don't have one on hand. I have launched Ubuntu on it so that she can still make it to her mecca (facebook [to which I loath]) but I've run drive diagnostics on her disk for physical errors, I've also run ram tests too. everything comes back as physically there are no defects so this tells me it is in the software.

I don't know a ton about Ubuntu, so I don't want to play with her windows system files in Ubuntu UNLESS there is a really simple fix that someone could point me to a nice tutorial for.

My thoughts at the moment are to get a disk and run a windows repair off the disk. Cause I'd like to not have to fresh install because of data loss and this is a girl in college that has no sense of backing up data...

any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
~Casey

[patonb]

I'd use the ubuntu to backup her stuff to usb or external. It'll be a simpe drag drop, or even burn a dvd of it.

have you checked for virus? You could use something like HouseCall - Free Virus Scan to do a webscan of her win drives.

But most likely its going to be a wipe and load, as Vista doesn't really have a "repair" feature like xp.
There is a repair how to on here somewhere though.

[cwr89]

No repair feature? man am I glad I never upgraded...
how do go about the recovery partition of the drive? its a Gateway laptop. I don't have any of the system disks. I know that getting drivers won't be any trouble at all. but it does have a recovery sector.

~Casey

[Mak213]

Does the machine have a Recovery Partition? I would check that out as it could restore it to factory defaults with little effort. Just have to backup her personal data.

There is a repair, it is just a long winded one. You should check it out as it is the same thing for Win7 as well. There is no repair feature.

Basically what you do is a in-place upgrade over your former install.

[patonb]

Ahhhhh I love how people poo poo Vista features that are the basis of Win 7...

Usually, the recovery partion is like f11 on boot.

Edit

Originally Posted by gateway forum

To boot into the recovery partition you're supposed to hold down the ALT key and repeatedly tap f10. This didn't work for me. I just kept ending up in the Windows Vista error recovery page which has no relevance to the partition.

Try that.

[cwr89]

F11 does not boot the recovery I just get a little message to put in a vista disk and pray...

[patonb]

It should be there, somewhere...

Did you try my edit?

alt f10 ?