Vista Home Premium, blue screen with cursor.

Factual Questions
1

Hi all,

I wonder if anyone could help me. My desktop is acting up. It’s got MS Window Vista Home Premium, Dell Vostro_400, Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 3gig RAM. Hadn’t recently presented any problems until this morning. I started the computer and it said there were a couple of corrupted files that needed to be scanned. The scan went ahead. Since then whenever I try to access the PC the usual way it takes ages and ages and all I get is a blue screen with a cursor. I can start Task Manager but nothing I’ve tried so far has had any effect. This is whether I log in under my own account or as a guest.

To add to my confusion there seem to be two versions of Vista installed.
When I’m booting up I get the option of Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Vista. When I select the latter the PC boots up, apparently as normal, except it’s all files and software from 2010 and prior. It’s in this version I’m writing this post. I can’t seem to access any of my work, photos, music etc. from the past 3 years. Any help with this would be appreciated. I don’t have the original Vista disc unfortunately, it seems several of the proposed solutions online depend on using it.

I’d like to salvage this PC if possible as I’m not exactly flush at the minute. If I did however purchase a new PC would it be difficult to retrieve the files off the old hard drive? Most of my work is backed up online but many of the photos aren’t and there’s some of my own recorded files that I’d find hard (but not impossible) to get copies of again.

Again, any and all help is much appreciated.

2

Start —> Computer —> C:---->users

If there are multiple user profiles open each one and look for the documents or desktop folders to see if your files are there.

3

One empty guest one and one in my own name with the old files but nothing since '10.

4

It sounds like you have a second copy of Windows on a partition that’s corrupted some how so the other copy (the '10 copy) can’t see the partition, and the copy on that partition can’t boot at all.

If you have backups (let me guess, you don’t. They never do) just wipe the drive and reinstall, keeping in mind it’s likely the HD is dead and will need replaced. If you don’t have backups, then… hm. You could start with an error check on the disk.

The good news is since you have a working Windows install, you can use it to pull the files even if you never get the other Windows install running. The tricky part is getting it to recognize the other partition is there at all.

EDIT: Oops apologies, you said in your OP that most of the files were backed-up. Mea culpa. In that case, you can buy a new HD and install Vista on it, then use your original HD in a enclosure or plugged into the second SATA port to attempt to recover files from. I wager the HD is bad, but with that option you get both a working computer and a better chance to recover the photos and music.