A few days ago my parents complained to me that their Windows Vista PC wouldn’t boot up properly anymore.  After initially thinking this would be a simple fix (restart it one more time), I unfortunately found that they were correct.  Each time Windows would start up it would quickly blue screen and force itself into a continuous reboot cycle.  And believe me when I say quickly.  This thing would flash on the screen and leave you no time to read it.

Vista, unlike its predecessors, doesn’t just make another attempt at booting normally after it restarts from a failure.  Instead, it recommends that you boot into a recovery console which offers several options like running memory diagnostics, loading system restore, using the startup repair tool, etc.  I decided to try this option, but when it was taking 10-20 minutes to load up, I gave up and declared a problem with either the memory or the hard drive.  Makes sense, right?

I wasted no time swapping out memory and several other components.  This, unfortunately, produced the same result each time.  Thinking the hard drive was now the culprit, I removed it from the system and hooked it up to one of my handy SATA-to-USB converters and connected it to another machine.  I was disappointed to find out that even a program like GetDataBack was not able to read the hard drive, let alone accessing it from Explorer.  Just thinking about reinstalling Windows and figuring out a way of restoring all my dad’s business files and music was dizzying.

I elected to make one last attempt at the recovery console before installing a new drive and starting from scratch.  I started booting up the console and I walked away for 20 minutes.  When I returned, I was surprised to see that it had actually booted while I was gone.  I opened up the Startup Repair option and let it run.  What happened five minutes later was to my pure astonishment.  Windows actually booted up!  No errors, no blue screens, no weird slowness, etc.  It was like the problem never happened.

In the end, I’ll definitely give this tool a try when I run into similar problems in the future.  Because somehow, it turned an unreadable partition into a complete working one.

With hype starting to build around the next version of Windows, I think there will be much to write about.  Not to mention all the cloud computing stuff that’s going on with Windows Live (specifically Live Mesh) and Google’s efforts.  I’m hoping this becomes a place to store thoughts, ideas and maybe even procedures.  In that regard, it can be as helpful as I hope it is for anyone else.

If you have any ideas or suggestions for what you’d like to see here, feel free to drop me a line.  Oh, and thanks for reading…  let’s hope things go well.