Hi, I’m working on a data recovery for a a person who owns a dell Inspiron 1721… the OS boot sect was trashed and I’m not the most proficient in this stuff so I’ve been working from tutorials off the web and with a co-worker of mine. the machine has Vista pro sp1 on it, the data is there via a enclosure I can see it, but only under the “windows. old” designation. The drive had undetectable issues so I’ve imaged it to a good drive to rule out problems there, then I went through manually reassigning boot loader kinda stuff (sorry i can’t be more specific) What i did was run repair console then bootrec.exe / fix mbr etc and then sth to the gist of bootsect.exe /nt60 all/force and then I made a new entry for it with instructions I don’t have for it in front of me right now, but I selected “yes” and viola! things seems to turn around for me… t
he computer started booting it finally gave me a 1 time boot menu for windows (F8), there’s a mouse pointer that shows up, and right as it gets to the part where it would normally show a password BSOD:<< grrr… stop:f4 (which tells me nothing when i reference the code) So I tried safe mode, same thing… the 1 time boot menu will not provide me “Recovery console” and will not go straight into it, as it did before when attempting to boot so I’m stuck using the cd to get there. sfc /runnow is supposed to fix all my problems per my co-workers words, but it will not run because the"drive is locked" I’ve run through commands for sth like a day and half now and I’m really exhausted… I’m seeing something about "slipstreaming"vista and was wondering if I can “upgrade” the same version of vista on top of the existing copy so that it would just transfer all the files over to a working bootable windows vista. You see, at this point all that needs to happen is to have this OS boot and I’m done, cuz the data is all there already and on a known-good drive… I’m just really tired of trial and error stuff and I can’t make anything out of a “F4” stop code to help me resolve this issue.
So if you’re wondering what I’m asking:
- can you make anything of an F4 stop code based on my description?
2)can you replace/“upgrade” a completely new Vista boot section onto the front of an OS and resolve things this way.
- Any pointers that can get me out of this windows hell?
Thank you for bearing with me through this.