Is my Vista install beyond toast?

I have a t61p thinkpad and dual boot vista ultimate and ubuntu. Last night I left my laptop booted into windows running off the battery and forgot about it. I've never let the battery run out before and since I wasn't around when it died last night, I don't know what windows does when this happens. Does it detect the system is about to die and try to shut down properly?

Anyways the issue is that when I try to boot into windows, after choosing it at the boot screen the screen goes black and nothing happens. No loading screen and no HD activity. When I try to load the vista recovery partition I get a disk read error. Ubuntu boots up fine and when I try to mount the Vista drive, which I have always been able to view, I get an error saying it cannot be mounted. To make matters worse, I've got a Vista Ultimate install disc and I was going to try loading that and try using "repair windows" but when I boot the DVD, it loads as normal with the white progress bar at the bottom and then after that is finished the normal vista loading bar appears and after that is finished it leaves me at a black screen, unresponsive.

What is going on here??

 

Vista goes to hibernation if the battery is in the critically low. I think it was Hibernation as default..

 

I don't think so. I accidentally let my battery run out and the next time you boot, it says Windows did not shut down properly blahblah. I chose start up normally.

 

if u didnt mess up with your power plan settings, when your battery is @ 5% windows hibernates the system so that u can restart from wherever u left ur work after u plug it into AC. usually there is no trouble associated with this and everything goes fine.

did u mess up with the power settings in vista ??
did u keep ur laptop inside the bag switched on last night ??
what was the system doing when it was switched on ???

this looks like an mbr corruption as system couldnt hibernate and it turned off in midst of heavy disk activity. so ur C: got corrupted i think.

try logging into safe mode (press F8 just after grub screen and select safe mode) and try a chkdsk (in command prompt type chkdsk c: /r). if that doesnt work get hold of an xp cd and format the C: and reinstall using vista DVD

 

You can do this with the Vista DVD too... Why do you need an XP media o.o?

 

not always......... vista DVD first makes sure of the integrity of the drives before loading the setup screen. XP CD just makes sure that the drives are there and then boots the setup screen. u can see that this happens with emaginations case

 

how long did you keep it at the blackscreen?
i had this same problem with a Vista disk and i cleaned the disk, booted from it, and waited like 15 mins at that black screen and then it loaded

 

The only thing I changed in the power plan settings was turn off hibernation when the lid is closed. The laptop was not left in a bag, just sitting on a table with the lid closed. Nothing was running the last I left it. It was just sitting at the desktop.

It was definitely not in hibernation the next morning. I plugged the AC in and it booted up like normal, taking me to the boot menu to choose which OS I want to load. Ubuntu is fine. My Vista partition takes me to the black screen immediately after selecting it. F8 is ineffectual. Eventually hitting keys just gets me a beep for every keystroke. The backup partition for Vista, when loaded, gives me the disk error immediately after selecting.

I sat at the black screen with the Vista DVD for a good chunk of time but definitely not 15 minutes. I'll try again and let it sit for a while, but while it was at this black screen nothing was going on. The DVD drive wasn't moving and there didn't appear to be any HDD activity. But I'll give it another shot.

EDIT: Right after I typed this something popped into my head. I left the laptop idle, running no programs. In all my life of running windows machines, as prone to errors as they can be, I've never had a disk completely corrupted by hard shutting down. So the fact that it had nothing running when I left it puzzles me as to how it got corrupted. Well, I think it's scheduled to make backups real late at night. I usually don't have my laptop on at those times so when I boot it the next day it usually gives me a message saying it missed it's scheduled back up time. So I'm going to venture that it was in the middle of a scheduled backup when it ran out of battery life, which would help explain why the recovery partition is also giving me an error.

 

Still no dice with the Vista DVD. Just sits at a black screen indefinitely. Let it sit for 15-20 minutes.

 

Since you can get on Ubuntu, have you tried backing up your files and recreating the partition and then try reinstalling?

 

I can't mount the drive in Ubuntu. Is there a way around this? I tried mounting the drive again and clicked details on the error message and it said $logfile indicates unclean shutdown. Operation not supported Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use.

So this at least for sure confirms my suspicions that my problem is due to a bad shutdown. It says the drive is marked as in use, is there a way to fix this? I would like to at least access the drives files somehow and backup a few things before reformatting. The error details also mentioned something about a command line to mount the drive and add 'force' to the end of the command line. This only brought up a bunch of options that I didn't understand.

EDIT: Had a space in the command that shouldn't have been there. That said, still get the same errors when trying to mount with force.

 

try connecting the drive to another windows computer to access the files

 

I don't know how I would do that as I am on a laptop and it's an internal drive.

Doesn't really matter anyways. I used my Ubuntu disk's partitioner to delete my windows partitions and since I've done that my Vista Ultimate disk works. I will be reinstalling tonight.

 

didn't you have any important info on that drive?

 

Does your Bios see the drive? This sounds like a complicated issue and you should try to isolate the problem to the drive. Unless the data is irreplacable and you don't want to format, I highly suggest just take your laptop in to IBM and have them handle it.