Aint Bootin' ::Sigh::

And i'm pretty sure by this time, I was the only person in the world who had never once had a problem with Vista.

Alright, so:
I have an ASUS M51Sn. Great Laptop, never had an issue, until just now, (And i've had it for almost 3 years, so its done me well) ((Also - If I had the money to buy a new laptop, I would, I know this one has lasted longer than expected, but I dont, and I like this one ^-^))


Straight to the point:
My computer froze, so I did a hard reset on it.
When it rebooted it comes up with "Windows is loading files."
I'm thinkin "This cant be good."
But it got past that no worries. Came up with that wonderful green vista scrolling bar of optimism. After the normal amount of time, it went blank, as it always does before we get that pretty startup noise and a screen full of windows.
But this time, it went blank, and it stayed blank...

I left it overnight, as the CPU light was illuminated. Not flickering, but just...lit.
I came back after work the next day to find nothing had changed.

SO, I jumped on this PC (Missus's) and downloaded a recovery image for vista, burned it onto a CD, set my laptop to boot from CD, and tried it.
More or less the same thing happened, except this time I was met with a vista background screen, and a pointer I can move around, like normal.
Unfortunately I wasnt given any dialog boxes to tell it to start repairing off the partition.

I took the disc out, just because I figured it cant get any worse, and wanted to see if I could scare it into working. Did another hard reset, and I got as far as the vista background again.

So whatever the disc did, it gave me a nice background to look at, and move the mouse around.
Sure, its not what I paid for, but I mean, laptops are like mobile phones now right? All those functions and applications that are useless... WRONG!

So, I've moved house a number of times since buying the laptop and cant seem to find that wonderful DvD that I got with the damn thing.
While I keep looking I was hoping someone might've gone through the same thing, or something similar and might have some suggestions as to how I can go about fixing it, without spending any money.

Thanks in advance,
yours kindly,
James.

 

Ummm...right before the windows loading screen, press F8 rapidly. Select "Safe Mode" (not the other safe mode options) and see if Windows boots into it. If it gets to the desktop, just restart normally. If may just come up on reboot after that. Just entering safe mode can often fix startup issues, without you having to do anything else yourself. Safe mode also disables Aero so if your 3d acceleration isn't working, it will still appear properly and let you disable Aero for the normal Windows mode.

Give it a try.

 

I gave it a go, tried to boot it in safe mode.
It got all the way through its loading drivers without any errors, did its scrolling windows bar, got through that, and then I was met with the infamous black screen, this time I had a mouse that I could move around, and Safe Mode in each corner, but nothing more unfortunately.

SO, what I did was I selected "Last Known Good Boot" or whatever its called, and tried that. That didnt work either, unfortunately it took me back to the Vista background screen, with naught but a mouse to move.

Any other suggestions?
Ps - Do you guys think this is a windows problem? I initially thought it might have been the HDD thats died on me, but it didnt come up with an error during the driver initiation.

 

You can try reinstalling Vista, I'm sure your files will be unaffected. That should definitely fix your problem.

 

I would think the windows installation is corrupted. This seems like driver issues or something. The good news is the rest of your data is probably fine until you wipe it out with a new OS install or something (you can always tell the computer not to delete your existing data, and it will move it all to the folder C:\Windows.old). If you hit F9 on bootup (same procedure as F8, try it once or twice) I think you will be brought to the Asus recovery partition (if you have one) and you can choose what to do from there. If you don't have one you will need an OS install disc of some sort. What recovery image did you download?

 

I would love to reinstall Vista, I really would, but unfortunately they either didn't give me a Disc, or I lost it, along with all the rest of the stuff they gave me... DOH!

 

Good to know, there's always things we dont want to lose off our computers.
I'm a heckler for throwing things out, stupidly, so for me, its all those programs that I thought I'd never need to install again >.<

I'll give it a couple of tries. How patient should I be? If it comes up with a blank screen, or one as I've described previously, should I leave it for an hour or so, or just give it 5-10 minutes and try again?

 

Yup, blame it on the hard drive. Or a magnet. Or EMP pulses from the USSR, trying to take over your brain. Whatever it is, check the integrity of your hard drive, that might be why it isn't fully installing/loading/running/pr0n browsing.