Boot Problem

snappyfish · 24 May 2018 at 11:05

I have Dad's partners laptop here, I get this painful experience from time to time. Its an old Compaq laptop running Vista.

It got turned off before it shut down as it was taking to long apparently. Now on boot, it goes to startup repair but does not repair itself.

The only way I get it to boot is by choosing "Disable Driver Signature Enforcement"

Any thoughts?

Jamin280672 · 24 May 2018 at 16:09

snappyfish said:
I have Dad's partners laptop here, I get this painful experience from time to time. Its an old Compaq laptop running Vista.

It got turned off before it shut down as it was taking to long apparently. Now on boot, it goes to startup repair but does not repair itself.

The only way I get it to boot is by choosing "Disable Driver Signature Enforcement"

Any thoughts?

If it came with vista pre installed it should have a recovery partition on the hard drive, look up which buttons you need to press during post to fire up the recovery and it will fix Windows for you by re-installing it, on my acer laptop its ALT + F10, just spam them during post to launch the recovery partition, you should be able to choose to keep existing data or a full clean install, its basically like a factory reset, just sounds like the forced shut down has damaged critical system files.

See here: https://neosmart.net/wiki/compaq-recovery-disk/ scroll down to RESTORE WINDOWS VISTA IF YOU CANT BOOT INTO WINDOWS VISTA for instructions.

snappyfish · 24 May 2018 at 21:36

Jamin280672 said:
If it came with vista pre installed it should have a recovery partition on the hard drive, look up which buttons you need to press during post to fire up the recovery and it will fix Windows for you by re-installing it, on my acer laptop its ALT + F10, just spam them during post to launch the recovery partition, you should be able to choose to keep existing data or a full clean install, its basically like a factory reset, just sounds like the forced shut down has damaged critical system files.

See here: https://neosmart.net/wiki/compaq-recovery-disk/ scroll down to RESTORE WINDOWS VISTA IF YOU CANT BOOT INTO WINDOWS VISTA for instructions.

Thanks, have gone down the backup files and restore partition method, just didn't even want to do that. And wondered if anyone had experienced a similar issue with a quicker fix.

It's painful just how slow some old laptops are.

Jamin280672 · 25 May 2018 at 07:22

snappyfish said:
Thanks, have gone down the backup files and restore partition method, just didn't even want to do that. And wondered if anyone had experienced a similar issue with a quicker fix.

It's painful just how slow some old laptops are.

Yup, I have a slow painful one too, I got rid of windows off of it and put phoenix os on it instead, it's android 7.1 I brought it back to life, I have a video on YouTube, I'll see if I can find the link on how to install it.

https://youtu.be/c68qgPepjFI

Habakkuk · 26 May 2018 at 16:58

Vista hasn't been supported for awhile - can you upgrade it to Windows 7 - that's still getting updates.

snappyfish · 27 May 2018 at 18:07

Habakkuk said:
Vista hasn't been supported for awhile - can you upgrade it to Windows 7 - that's still getting updates.

For ease for myself I've just restored the factory image on vista and update that to service pack 2. Got a back up of files, and recommended laptop upgrade time.

t31os · 27 May 2018 at 18:27

Cheap performance boost would be to stick an SSD in there, the 120gb drives are very affordable right now.