Frelling Vista...

[Dreamstalker]

Some sort of Vista update hosed my laptop last night...luckily I didn't lose a hell of a lot in restoring it to a factory state (MP3s are on my player so I can copy them back, I own the Real Ghostbusters DVDs so can just rip them again, and everything else important is backed up in two other places). The re-setup is annoying though...just when I had this thing running the way I wanted.

The only applications I installed as new were Spybot SD and the PCTools firewall; it doesn't seem like those should have caused a conflict. Unless Windows Defender was throwing a fit...

Recovery Console diagnostics showed no disk errors or other problems, but something in the OS was definitely fried....whatever went wrong, Microsoft didn't know what to do with it.

Any ideas what happened?

[SteeleDragon78]

what kind of symptoms did it show? saying its hosed with no other info is like telling a doctor i dont feel good and leaving it at that. though i know that some of the vista updates will hose certain hardware pieces, will need some more input for diagnosis

[dmf]

if its blue screening before windows try a chkdsk /r at the command line if you have not already tried it.
otherwise without more info cant help much.

[Dreamstalker]

what kind of symptoms did it show?

The only weird behavior was when I turned it on again following the shutdown after installing updates, it went through a couple boot attempts then popped up the "Windows was unable to start" screen; the options were Normally and Recovery Mode. Immediately preceding that screen, the path for a registry entry flashed up very quickly (I couldn't read the details). No bluescreens.

The laptop is a stock HP, haven't added anything really.