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So a few days ago I left my computer for about 15 minutes and came back to a completely locked up PC. Ctrl/Alt/Delete failed and I was forced to shut down via the power button. When I rebooted it did an automatic check disk and then I was able to boot up without a problem. Fearing an upcoming hard drive failure I began the attempt to email some important documents to myself, but when I opened my documents to attach failures, explorer.exe locked up. Slowly, everything else began to lockup, until I could not do anything like before. After another reboot and auto-chkdsk, the computer ran fine for about a day, but this morning I have awoken to it not responding in hibernation. There was no chkdsk on reboot this time. Any ideas what is going on? Edit: It is running fine again right now... but I'm sure I will run into another lockup sooner than later. |
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Vista has a tendency to completely corrupt itself. Hook your hard drive up to another computer if possible and pull as much stuff off as you can. Then reinstall Vista. There is almost no way to repair Vista unless you can boot into it. Seeing as you can't though, unfortunately you must reinstall. When you hook your hard drive up to another computer, use a program called Jelly Bean Keyfinder to locate your product key for some of your software. If Vista was preinstalled on your computer, do not use the product key that Jelly Bean finds, it will not work. Instead, there should be a sticker with you product key located somewhere on your PC, use this. I can boot into it; I'm on it right now. Sorry if I left that part unclear. I'm just trying to figure out what's causing it to lock up occasionally. Vista does not inherently corrupt itself. If the hard disk is fine you do not need to hook it up to another computer. There are plenty of ways to repair Vista if you can't boot into the OS. If the hard disk is fine, it's likely that you wont even need to reinstall. All he needs to do is insert the Windows Vista installation DVD and boot from it. On the first screen that welcomes you to the installer, there's a link to launch various automated recovery tools. Have the Windows installer attempt to repair boot problems for you, and see if that lets you get back into Windows. Hopefully it's not a bad hard disk causing your troubles... I have never had the tools on the Vista DVD fix any problems. But, since he is on the computer right now, there are 2 options he has for repairing. The first that I would try is going into the command prompt and running the command "sfc /scannow" without quotes. Make sure the Vista DVD is in the drive. If that doesn't work, I would try this: . Your files should all remain during the repair but a backup couldn't hurt anyway. |
