I have an issue with my Vista machine. Two days ago it froze up on me when I was trying to shut it down from the start menu, and I ended up having to pull the plug on it to turn it off.
As a result, it now will not boot all the way up. It gets to the screen where you see the progress bar with the green lines that bounce back and forth, then there’s a quick flash of a blue screen (of death?) and the computer then attempts to reboot again. It does this over and over.
Ive tried all the options you get by tapping (F6? F8?) during initial boot up, like “reboot from last known good config”, Safe mode, etc and I get the same result with all of them. There’s a paragraph on one of those screens that advises me to put in the Vista disc so it can attempt a repair, and I’d like to do that, except the computer won’t boot from the disc. Or I am not doing something right. Is there a command prompt or something somewhere were I can force it to read from the disc so I can attempt a repair? I do think this is a corrupted file issue and not a hardware one. The PC sounds the same as before, the power supply is certainly working, etc.
Do I need to bring up BIOS and change the boot order or something? I’ve never done that on Vista before so I don’t know how.
Depending on your make/model/hardware there are a few different key combo options.
On the splashscreen when first turning on your PC, it should list at the bottom Press ## for Setup, and Press ## for Boot menu.
If you have a Boot menu key, press that and choose your DVD drive as the boot option.
From there it should boot from the DVD.
If you are a novice and have important data on your machine, you might want to hire someone to help you in case of potential data loss.
After you boot from the disc you should see a “repair my computer” in the lower left. Choose that, and hopefully it will repair automagically. If not, I will try to check back on this thread to be of further assistance to let you know how to run a few commands to potentially resolve the situation.
You can also enter the Advanced Boot Options menu by pressing the F8 key during the boot process. Select “Disable automatic restart on system failure” and hit enter. This will prevent the computer from getting into a boot loop, and will actually stop on the blue screen, allowing you to see the STOP codes. You can Google those for info on the error.
I just went through this on one of my laptops a few weeks ago. Turned out the hard drive had failed. Luckily I had an extra drive laying around.
Well, crap. I went ahead and splurged and bought a copy of 7 Home Premium. I am kinda pissed that I wasn’t able to use the “upgrade” feature from Vista to 7, thereby preserving my old settings, programs, etc because I needed to boot the old OS up and put in the 7 disc to do that, which was my problem in the first place, so I just did a fresh install.
The system told me that my previous files on Vista would be kept (and be accessible) in a file called “windows.old”…does anyone have any experience in transferring files from that location to my current, new and shiny OS (oooh, pretty lights!)? How do I even locate that file?
How do I get my Steam games I have paid for onto my new OS?
I recently reloaded the same Vista that came with my laptop, and it put some files in a folder called windows.old. It was easy to find, just listed in the file directory. You can drag and drop files out of there like anything else. No problem. However, it just saves your personal files, not program files or system files. If you don’t see the windows.old in your file list - and it would not at all surprise me if MS just decided, well, to do it differently and in a more confusing way for no apparent reason - do a search. If still not there, chalk it up to yet another instance in the infinitude of windows/MS nonsense.
I did XP Home support for a while 'round about when they introduced this feature. It saved loads of time when the user had the proper service pack that enabled this.
Depending on your situation, it’s also possible to use the existing files. In my case, I boot from a new SSD, and Steam continues to download to the directory I used to use on my old drive. Saved me lots of time (and GB of bandwidth). I think this is roughly what I did.
Sweet guys, thanks for the answers. Another issue though: I only have a 150GB hard drive on my machine, and right now its telling me that I only have 10GB free. Windows 7 only requires 16GB free, so where did all my free space go?
I suspect it is because of the windows.old folder. Its huge. I guess I will try to offload most of that onto my external drive and then delete the folder altogether to free up space unless someone has any other bright ideas (aside from buying another hard drive, of course!).
150GB is too small to do much, especially if you play a lot of games. Get over to spoofee.com or a similar website, and look for sales on hard drives. You can get 1TB for under 50 bucks these days.
The Steam MSI (installer) file can’t be loaded. Its trying to default install to the windows.old folder, which I deleted (but apparently strings of which remain somewhere…the registry, perhaps?) and when I try to put it somewhere else it either tells me it cannot be installed in a system file or needs to be installed into an empty folder (which I tried to do). I don’t know where to install this program so it will work and I can get all my games back!
There was no option to try that, its either “run” or “cancel”. I tried again to put the installation file into the Windows folder but it denied me again, saying that it cannot install this program into a system files folder, so I tried putting it into the empty folder I created in Program Files (x86) called “Steam” and for some reason this time…it worked!
Time will tell how the games run. I’m downloading L4D2 first and I’ll give it a whirl and see how stable it is once its finished. I am worried that this install of 7 might be buggy just based on a couple weird things I have seen since the installation, just by poking around.
Well, actually Windows itself is just one big bug.
Though, in all seriousness if I were you I would be worried about hardware damage, since the initial failure is not explainable, slapping on Win7 on there will make things worse, and you’ll soon find out that if you thought Vista was bloated, you’re in for a world of hurt with 7… Just sayin’
A question I pondered myself many times as I peered at the mysteriously shrinking horizon of my hard disk. I ponder no more. Following one of the many valuable suggestions in [thread=538187]this[/thread] sticky, I installed and ran CCleaner. Said cleaner subsequently found and deleted a lapcroad of useless temp files, thus liberating a lost continent of disk space.
The main reason for your shrinking hard drive is a “feature” of Windows called Windows Side by Side. Check how big your c:\windows\winsxs folder is. My four year old Vista laptop is about 25 gb, my 6 month old 7 desktop is 6 gb already. Unfortunately there is nothing you can do to stop the expansion of that folder short of not installing any software and never applying any windows updates :eek: plus, you can’t delete anything in there and there is no tool for cleaning that whatsoever :dubious:
It is very unlikely that winsxs and temp files are to blame as it is a new install of windows. The Windows.old folder (which will contain your old temp files and winsxs folder) is the most likely culprit. Once you have all your data recovered from it you can just delete the whole thing.
If you are still struggling to track down the folders holding all your data use the 30-day trial of Treesize Pro, it will tell how big each folder is and rank them in order of size.
Yeah it was the windows.old folder. It took a loooong time to delete, too. And another program like that one that is really good at showing you what’s eating your hard drive space up is WinDirStat.
