Boot Problem

[snappyfish]

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?

 

[snappyfish]

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.

 

[snappyfish]

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.