Vista problems

[eddyb]

that's true, i have problems with vista... many peoples says that is a normal thing, but to me is not.

i have chrashed a lot my dual boot harddisk, coz i needed to delete my linux, and after some cleanups, i have only a ntfs for vista and a ext2 for my os.
i've repaired both mbr and pbr(partition boot record), but i have a strange problem ( . It displays "J", a heart, a smily face and three horizontal and parallel lines. It displays this even if i restored the bcd... How would be that message translated(that was in textmode, i think... you know better)?!
PS: i'm posting from a hackish live cd(it good enought if it has some hackish browser...)
Thank you if you will give me some solutions!

[01000101]

I think I may be misunderstanding you, but are you saying that your vista partition displays the random text on bootup? or your OS partition?

If it is vista's, you should try to do a repair install of vista to restore system critical files.

[eddyb]

my os partition isn't bootable(it contains only some files i saved from the dying linux).
so it's from vista, and it's the only thing displayed on the screen.
repair install isn't in the repair facilities from the vista dvd, so i think is an option in the install process...
i repaired mbr, pbr, bcd(i think they are ok, but could be situations when they are not ok on the vista dvd ), so i think is from bootmbr, or some other boot program. some debug ideea is to translate that characters into hex, and then to search all the harddisk for it , but is time-loosing.

[AJ]

Hi,

I fail to see how this is a problem with Vista. You have trashed your MBR and goodness knows what else, and you are expecting the operating system to recover.

The symbols you are seeing probably do not have any meaning other than the CPU is trying to execute some random instructions in a part of memory that does not contain a valid binary.

If you have a retail or upgrade version of Vista, the installation routine will show you a repair option. If you have an OEM version that you did not buy separately (if your DVD came with the computer), chances are that your computer manufacturer has just provided you with a hard drive clone (or a recovery partition, which you have obviously trashed). In that case, you won't have a repair option and must either try to use tools which claim to fix the MBR.

There are some 3rd party (non-M$) disk images you can download which specifically give you tools to try to fix broken installations. Whether any of them can cope with Vista or not, I don't know - you'll have to experiment, but at least they may allow you to clone your current HDD before you go through the OEM reinstall instructions to restore your system to factory settings.

Cheers,
Adam

[Laksen]

My guess is that you used grub as your main boot manager and tried a vista repair, which trashed the bootsector. This can't be fixed very easily

If you intend to run vista and do anything with grub on the same disk then use vista's bootmanager to start grub. It's a little complex to set up but runs very stable

[Combuster]

Vista can very well be started from GRUB

The trick with dualbooting is usually:
1) boot linux
2) partition the harddisk as appropriate
3) reboot, start windows
4) install windows
5) reboot, start linux
6) install linux
7) install grub

[Laksen]

Vista can very well be started from GRUB

Yes, but Vista's fixmbr or chkdsk has a history of trashing the Grub bootloader

[AJ]

Hi,

If you are still looking to recover your Vista installation, it looks like there is a genuine (legal) way to do this by downloading an .iso of the Vista recovery installation. This contains Microsoft's Vista Recovery console and is designed for systems where the OEM did not provide installation media. It can only be used to recover and cannot be used for a full install.

I stumbled across the web site several times when searching for a way to extract the Vista install files from my HP laptop's OEM recovery disk. Although the file I found appears legitimate (as long as you have an original OEM version), it is hosted via a torrent and I'm not providing the direct link here. A quick Google should solve your problem, though!

Cheers,
Adam

Edit: You may also like to see this thread which is a way of extracting the original Windows installation files from your vendor's recovery disks. You may have to modify it a little if you don't have an HP. Again, the forum it's hosted on seem very quick to ban illegal content and this topic has been up for 18 months, so I'm sure its legit.

[eddyb]

I don't know if all of you understood well: i had a multi -boot system, with grub &co. I deleted the linux, and now i have only the windoze vista. I used repair console from the vista dvd(i have a vista ultimate oem dvd) and did bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /fixboot, and bootrec /repairbcd.
so i should have all boot thing vista compatible.. but it's not

[Love4Boobies]

If the info is really trashed, there's no way to recover it (except perhaps analyzing everything by hand, knowing your partition sizes). There were offsets there that told where the partitions are. It's not Vista's fault and your tools don't know how to repair it because they can't guess.