How-To Geek

No change from a month ago?
http://www.howtogeek.com/forum.....replies=25

natalia, your system is booting into the Windows Recovery Environment (RE). This can happen if the system thinks there was a failure to boot on the previous attempt. What's most troubling is that it can't find a Vista operating system to repair. I can guide you through some diagnosis, but it won't be easy. There is no good way to capture the output. You could write it down or take a picture with a digital camera if it's clear enough to see.

We'll start with a look at your hard drives and partitions. Type the commands shown below. Everything left of the ">" is part of the prompt and will already be there, so you don't type that. If you get an error message at any point, stop and report back.

X:\windows\system32> diskpart

DISKPART> list disk
DISKPART> select disk 0
DISKPART> list partition


I check back here every so often throughout the day. I want you to run the commands I gave above (diskpart, etc.) and show me the output. This will tell us what Windows sees for disks that are available, and what partitions are on them. If you write it down, you can leave out the big long numbers in squiggly brackets {}.

X:\windows\system32> diskpart
The output is

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.0.6000
Copyright <C> 1999-2007 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: MINWINPC

DISKPART> list disk

And the output is

disk ### status size free dyn gpt
disk 0 online 186GB 0B

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is not the selected disk.

DISKPART>list partition

partion ### Type Size Offset
partion 1 OEM 10 GB 32 KB
partion 2 Primary 88 GB 10 GB
partion 3 Primary 85 GB 98 GB
partion 4 Primary 3320 MB 183 GB

PS I cant thank you enough!!

OK, if you are still at the DISKPART> prompt from above, continue as follows. If not, run the above commands first, then continue:

DISKPART> select partition 2
DISKPART> detail partition
DISKPART> exit

This will provide information about the first primary partition. Please copy the output here. The "exit" command will close Diskpart and return to the X: prompt. Previously, when you ran chkdsk, it was run on the Recovery Partition which is called PQSERVICE. Now, let's run it on C: which is hopefully the letter assigned to the first primary partition. The command is:

X:\windows\sysetm32> chkdsk /F c:

The "/F" means fix any problems that are found. I don't need to see all of the output from this command, just the following lines:

The type of the file system is ...
Volume label is ...
Windows has checked/made corrections ...

The message that says "failed to transfer logged messages" is normal in Windows RE. It simply means that there is no place to write the error log to.

DISKPART> select partition 2
Partition 2 is now the selected partition

DISKPART> detail partition
DISK Display the properties of the selected disk.
PARTION Display the properties of the selected partion.
VOLUME Display the properties of the selected volume.

DISKPART> exit
Leaving DiskPart

X:\windows\sysetm32> chkdsk /F c:
The type of the file system is NTFS
Volume label is ACER

stage 1 verifying files
File verification completed.
449 large files recorded.
0 bad files reoreds processed.
0 EA recoreds processed.
50 preparse records processed.

Stage 2 verifying indexes
and that's taking a while...

139584 security descriptors processed.
Security descriptor verification completed.
16759 data files processed
Usn Journal verification completed.
Correcting errors in the Master File Table <MFT> mirror.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in master file bitmap.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

92697599 KB total disk space
41397000 KB in 121136 files
62444 KB 16760 indexes
0 KB in bad sectors
243611 KB in use by the system
65536 KB occupied by the log file
50994544 KB available on disk

finally that's over!

Ouf...but now I really have to go .... cause it's 2.40am and I have to be up at 6!

When you tell me what to do next, I'll do it and tell you!

Goodnight mr awesome!!

my computer crashed...tells me to reload windows...can not find disc...help

my dearest scott,
I dont know if we could call it a progress...but here's what happening with my pc now.

I shut it down last night, without running the check again. And I started it today and look what I got: the acer screen, then the microsoft one and then instead of the cute blue screen, a black screen saying:

windows error recovery
windows did not shut down successfully.If this was due to the system not responding or if the system was shut down to protect data, you might be able to recover by choosing one of the Safe Mode configurations fron the menu below (use the arrow keys to highlight your choice.)

safe mode
safe mode with networking
safe mode with command prompt
start windows normally

And at first I chose start windows normally, and I was kinda hoping it'd all be over and I'd see my pc again..but no...after choosing that, a black screen appeared with nothing on it, just the arrow of the mouse...I left it for a while, in case it needed time to load, but nothing....so I pressed the shut down bottom.

Then I chose the option safe mode with command prompt because I thought I'd get the black screen to type in, but no..I did get a black screen with commands on it, but they were running by themselves, I couldnt type in..And again the black screen..

Is this good or bad?? I think I'm beginning to miss the system recovery options screen...