Hi, I require assistance. Earlier this afternoon my computer decided it was going to attempt a violent and out of nowhere death, here are the details: I restarted my computer (I have vista home premium 64-bit, please, no vista comments), and it got past the Microsoft loading bar and usually the Vista logo shows up and makes it little sound. Well, it never did, and infact took so long my monitor went into idle. So I just shut off my computer and restarted again, as sometimes I've had a few issues with the computer getting stuck on the loading bar but a quick manual shut down and restart always fixed it. This was not the case - it did it again. So I shut it down again and was able to restart in safe mode. I ran adaware, hijack, ccleaner, etc, but did not run virus scan because nothing had come up on those and a virus scan takes upwards of an hour and a half with full scan; plus, I have ESET NOD32 and it hadn't alerted me of anything before the beginning of this saga. So I ran all those (except the virus scanner), and nothing came up so I shut the computer down and took it apart to clean it out just incase it was an overheating issue because of maybe too much dust or something. I cleaned it up, came back, turned it back on and it wouldn't move past the loading Microsoft bar. So I shut it down again, restarted, and the little "start windows normally, etc" menu came up and said that on the previous attempt Windows Failed to load. So I tried to load it from its previous successful loading attempt and nothing. Safemode wouldn't load, and it wouldn't just load 'normally' either. So I found my vista disc and was going to try to repair it, but it never gave me a prompt to repair and instead asked to install vista. So I did, which in hindsight may not have been the best option, but here I am. And I was curious if there is anyway to restore a previous installation of Vista/Windows even after installing a 'fresh copy' that brought over all the files from the old install. The reason being is that the computer cannot locate my video or audio drivers despite me trying to install the drivers from their respective CDs. So any assistance would be helpful before I tear my hair out, take this to someone else to fix, or go purchase windows 7 and spend money in the process. Apologies for any rambling or incoherent sentences, it's been a long and stressful last seven hours. Thank you.
I do not think I formatted - it told me all my old files would be moved to windows.old, and that is where they are. Like my programs and stuff that I had previously, but they aren't really working nor do they remember any of their previous settings.
Hm. I never learned Windows Vista.....sorry! Unless there is a way to pull old settings, you might be SOL. Can you access your files though? Like photos and documents? everything else you would probably need to reinstall them.
Yeah, I can access them on both hard drives. It just put everything in c:/windows.old which is right under my c:/windows folder, and program files folders etc. I was able to open firefox from this, I think I transferred it over to the new program files (86x) folder and it opened and worked - it just didn't have any of my settings. Right now I'm trying to manually move every folder from windows.old and replace their respective ones in this install to see if I can just do it that way. But I am not sure how that is going to work, nor if what I just wrote actually made sense to anyone reading it. But thank you anyways.
I've got ya beat! Just spilled a full plastic cup of Diet Coke on my Macbook keyboard! I fired it up after drying upside down on the plane for a couple hours and it seems to be working! If you don't hear from me after this, you'll know why.
