Help, I did something to my sisters laptop.

She has a gateway P-7811FX.

She brought it to me today in hopes for me to speed it up for her.

What I did:

Update Graphics driver to 180.48 (9800m GTS)
Use Vista's disk manager to extend drive C: partition ~20GB More and shrink D:
Ran CCleaner, as well as the CCleaner registry fixer.
Ran JK Defrag 64bit.
Installed Firefox.

She has 64bit Windows Home Premium.
I did all this ~4 hours ago, and for 2-3 hours it worked fine. Just suddenly though my sister complained that it began freezing up. She rebooted it, and it booted to a blank screen. I held the powere button down, rebooted it manually, and it is now in an endless boot loop, only giving the option to "Startup Repair" and "Start Windows Normally"

I'm attempting a startup repair, but am doubtful. Start windows normally just reboots it again very shortly after trying.

 

I'm guessing when you resized the partition is when things went awry. You will need to use the Vista DVD and fixmbr and fixboot.

 

fixmbr and fixboot? Is that on the vista dvd? Easy to find?

The weird thing is, it was rebooted 2-3 times after the partitioning.

Just now it is sitting at a black screen, but the hard drive IS working. I don't want to interupt it just yet, because the hard drive is actually trying to do something.

 

Yeah they are command line commands. You could also use the repair install.

 

Here's a link to guide you with regards to what atbnet is talking about: http://www.syschat.com/dual-boot-vista-xp-vista-already-1946.html?garpg=3

 

At the point where you'e at right now I think you should burn a live cd of linux or Bart PE, get an external hard drive and start backing up important stuff. Then boot from the vista recovery dvd and go in the recovery console and do a chkdsk /f, if that don't fix anything, time to do a full reinstall...

 

This might also be related to a graphics driver problem. I once reformatted Vista and used 156.65 from the HP website, but it kept looping the reboot. So I reinstalled the BIOS and reset the default BIOS settings in the BIOS, then I reinstalled the 156.65 driver through safe mode and it worked. Just make sure you use Driver Sweeper or something then install 180.48.

 

Yeah I used driver sweeper when I did it.

Well it seems that the vista dvd I have and the vista dvd I need are two different things. It said the repair utility I have is a different version than what I need. Her dvd is about 4 hours away at her home. Maybe I need a vista sp1 repair utility. Hmm.

 

Did you disable the automatic restart in the "f8 menu"?

 

Uhh? No. Now it isn't giving me the "Startup Repair" option when I try to boot it. It just goes from the "No GUI" boot screen to a black screen, where the HD works, continuously.

 

At what point should I begin pressing F8? Directly after it tries to boot from a cd?

 

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/

download the appropriate vista recovery disc from the above site --it will allow you to run the start up repair. I don't think it will help, but....

FWIW, I am also in the bad video driver (or rather utility) camp.

Fixmbr and fixboot are completely off base--you are passing the point in the boot process where those errors occur.

I ran into a laptop just last week exhibiting the same symptoms. In this case, the computer was completely messed up with an nvidia driver loaded on a laptop with an intel integrated gpu. It was hanging right on the nvidia helper program loading.

I cannot say for certain if it was the two drivers or the utility, but what I did to solve the problem was use a bartpe disk and renamed both video driver files and the utility so they wouldn't load, rebooted so it came up in svga mode, uninstalled all driver related software in Programs and Features, and then installed the correct drivers.

 

Okay. well, how do i get this bartpe disk? I managed to get into the repair and there is no restore point, there is no problems found via startup repair.

fixboot and fixmbr do not work.

Where/what do i get/do said Bartpe disk?

After reading @ the bartpe website, It seems I need a copy of Vista x64, in either cd or .iso form, in order to make a bootable bartpe disk. Is that correct?

 

I think it has to do with the graphics driver too

 

you make one
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

you can also use any kind of linux live disk where you mount the ntfs partition, but the bart pe disk will be easier for you to work with if linux isn't your bag...

or, you can pull the drive and put it in another computer as a secondary drive and edit it that way. Again, you need to know what you are renaming. Off the top of my head, I don't know exactly what files I renamed. I had to look through the drive and figure them out

 

I did a "Last known good configuration" boot. And it worked. And now it works. I ran a chkdsk and there is no problems. I've rebooted it multiple times since then with no problems. This was odd.

 

Not necessarily.The Last Known Good Configuration feature restores registry information and driver settings that were in effect the last time the computer started successfully.

Basically, it rolls back the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet
key.

You would need to reinstall the drivers you already installed if you want them again. I'd stick with windows update, tho

 

Well it succesfully started a few times AFTER I installed the drivers. So I think they are all still there, I'll check though.

 

Remind me never to hire you as a Windows 'genius'.

 

Haha, no kidding. But I think we've all been there too at one point. I've nuked my fair share of MBRs.

 

Perhaps CCleaner caused instability with the registry cleaner, which was fixed with the Last Known Good Configuration?

 

Actually, come back in a couple of years, after you've managed to work your way through several systems, and I probably would hire you as the resident .Windows genius, because by then you'd have spent so much time fixing up your goof-ups, that you probably would be pretty knowledgeable about the guts of .Windows - that's how most of the folks here who know anything about anything got most of their knowledge, try it, break it, fix it.

 

I had the 'No GUI' boot screen mess up my laptop once, and Vista didn't want to boot until I disabled it in safe mode... that's about it.

 

Yeah, I know how it goes. Sometimes things just go awry. But, it's a learning experience.

 

Never run CCleaner after you installed a new driver/software etc etc. Wait til you reboot your system, then run CCleaner.