Vista Freezes at startup, Nothing is working

[publicenemy219]

As the title says, I've tried everything but using the actual CD since I have the OEM version. I tried a repair CD but when It loads up it gives me an I/O error saying my CD drive or harddisk may be damaged, which I highly doubt. I checked all my hardware did ATI tests on the vid card and checked temps on CPU and everything is working fine. I want to know if there is a way to fix this without reinstalling vista, I'm on the XP partition of the system which seems to be working atm. Any help is appreciated.

 

[publicenemy219]

Ok scratch what I said abotu XP working, it blue screens every once and while. Also I get Disk boot failures sometimes when I start the PC up in which I have to shut down multiple times until it lets me load windows

EDIT: I found a recovery disc on the web, Its asking for me to load drivers information on the recovery window, but honestly I don't know where to find it.

EDIT: Found the drivers, chkdsk isn't running correctly and chkdsk /r stops at 9% and =says its unreadable. Anything else I could try?

Also says volume is raw and windows only supports NTSF, which I have no clue what that means

 

[Jonmor68]

It looks as if you may have a faulty hard drive, download the diagnostic tools from the makers website and run them to check the drive.

 

[publicenemy219]

I figured if it were faulty, it wouldn't start up at all. When I log on my XP partition, it has the volume as NTSF, I burnt a Recovery disc I found online, so I don't know if its working properally.

 

[Scotteq]

If chkdisc is failing, then the chances are that your hard drive is failing.

 

[vulcan1]

I'm not sure if this is wholly correct with this issue. Yes, it is possible, but I'm reading quite a few other posts in different places that say they have gotten errors when the HD was not failing. (I'm currently looking for help on a similar issue).

(For reference, this is one of the threads I looked at: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistasetup/thread/e97484e1-1a7e-4518-a1b1-f602bef5f5c7

For whatever reason, windows in some situations is screwing up the readings so that even chkdisk can give errors when there are none present. To be clear, this seems to be an issue that is way higher with Vista than other versions, so for this issue related to a Vista computer, I'd be suspect of the chkdisk's findings...on XP, I'd take it's word for what it finds.

 

[Zoron]

It is still possible to boot into Windows with a failing hard drive... it all depends on the nature of the failure. If you're not convinced the drive is failing, then back up your data and wipe the drive completely using some sort of zero-write utility. You'll be able to confirm once and for all if you have a failing hard drive or not. Either way, having a back up of your data is important.