How to make a back-up in safe mode?

Hello all,

This morning my laptop running Vista Ultimate had a "parity error". Not sure what happened, I came across something that said it was a hardware error but this wasn't confirmed.

The sequence where the boot fails:
Everything is normal right up to the point just before the log-on (where you enter password) screen flashes up. Instead of flashing up the screen goes black and there's no activity as far as I can see.

Anyway, I can boot into Safe Mode, and I've access to all my files.

Ideally I'd like to fix the problem but I don't know how I'd go about this.

Failing a clear solution I'm looking for a way of backing up all my data and then re-installing Vista, and restoring the data.

At this moment I've Drive Image XML running to copy the entire hard drives (RAID0) to an external HD that I had to buy this morning. But I'm not entirely sure if this will work when it comes to reinstalling the data.

Any ideas on where to proceed? Should I attack the original problem or just try a re-install?

If there's any more info needed just ask and I'll post what I can.

Many thanks,
72oo

 

How about trying performing a scandisk once you are in safemode first? You
might get lucky

cheers ...

 

Thanks, how would I go about doing that?

 

you launch a command prompt and then type

Code:

chkdsk 

or

Desktop > My Computer > Select the Disk / Partition > Right Click > Properties > Tools > Error Checking > Check Now

 

Did it and it came up with several error in the indexes.

See attached file for the report.

 

Did you recently install some software or new drivers?

 

then run chkdsk with flag

Code:

chkdsk /f

 

I bit the bullet on this one and just re-installed the OS.

I didn't install anything new recently. In fact the laptop isn't fully on-line yet, I'm still updating the OS, and haven't brought alot of the hardware on-line yet. Hopefully, it will all go well.

Also bought a 1Tb external HD for back-up's. Something I've been meaning to do for ages! (Haha, isn't that always the way!)

Anyway, wasn't to bad as I could get all the info of the laptop with Drive Image XML via Safe Mode, so I can rebuild program setting and various games that I was playing.

72oo

 

Do you happen to have an Atheros based wifi card in your laptop?

 

Nope didn't have that wifi card.

I think there's a serious problem with the laptop, specifically the GPU's. Everything was going fine till I installed 183.13 GPU drivers and then the same problems appearred again.

Going to try and run driver sweep and then maybe the stock drivers that came with the laptop just to get it back to some sort of condition.

Although, I think its a hardware problem and the GPU's are up sh!t creek.... won't be fun getting this fixed me thinks.

 

Dell replacement GPU's coming out Tuesday, hopefully the solution.

 

It's a driver issue. In Safe Mode, only generic drivers are loaded. Your graphics driver is probably crashing when you start in normal mode. Vista then restarts the driver, but it crashes again. I had this problem before, except for me it was because the video driver didn't support more than 2 gigs of ram. If I ran with just 2 gigs, it was fine, but it would crash with more than 2 gigs. I then used a newer driver and it worked flawlessly.

I know you only have 2 gigs ram, but try some newer drivers. It might fix your problem.

 

Reloading the os will not fix a hard drive error. Only running chkdsk will.

 

Yeah, I think you're correct it was the loading/activating of the GPU's that caused the problem but even a re-install of Dell's basic drivers (as in not LTV2G) could not sort the problem. So hence it was my inclination and also Dell's that this problem was not rectifiable from software and therefore a hardware issue.

I've just got my fingers crossed that the replacement GPU's actually sort the problem.

Don't think its a hard drive issue TBH.