Need Help... Vista won't load

[rldelrosario]

good day all.

my daughter has a lenovo y310 laptop with windows vista home. problem now is that it wont load. i tried booting it up in safe mode to no avail. it gets stuck in the mircosoft corporation screen with that dotted lights moving left to right. anyway, my daughter has important files in there, so a clean reformat is out of the question. was wondering if i can install xp and not reformat the hard drive so as to be able to retrieve the files. or can i install the same vista os without deleting everything. the hard drive is not partitioned and i dont have the gadgets to remove the HD and attached it to another pc or laptop.

thanks all..

ronald

[nitroshift]

You can try a repair from the Vista disk. Hope you'll fix it, I know how it feels to lose important data... Good luck!

[beats]

i dont have the gadgets to remove the HD and attached it to another pc or laptop.

You'll only need a Phillips head screwdriver and a SATA cable+power plug. No exotic stuff there.

Keep in mind that installing other OS's - even without reformatting the drive - might cause data loss. So try a repair first, like nitropuppy already stated.

Edited September 30, 2009 by beats

[rldelrosario]

You can try a repair from the Vista disk. Hope you'll fix it, I know how it feels to lose important data... Good luck!

Tried the vista repair... but no luck... still stuck at the microsoft corp with the green dots light moving left to right. unit eventually turned off by itself.

i dont have the gadgets to remove the HD and attached it to another pc or laptop.

You'll only need a Phillips head screwdriver and a SATA cable+power plug. No exotic stuff there.

Keep in mind that installing other OS's - even without reformatting the drive - might cause data loss. So try a repair first, like nitropuppy already stated.

allright... think i would need to buy an adaptor for the sata cable coz my pc uses the old kind of cable.

thanks both for the help..

[cluberti]

Tried the vista repair... but no luck... still stuck at the microsoft corp with the green dots light moving left to right. unit eventually turned off by itself.

Sounds like a driver is corrupted, likely a boot driver like an antivirus filter driver or some similar kernel filter driver. If a Vista repair didn't fix it, that would limit it to a disk driver or boot filter driver for certain - you won't be able to fix that without a reinstall, so you're probably on the right path in recovering data with an external adapter or enclosure. As someone who does this from time to time, consider something like this.

[Tripredacus]

In addition, computers may turn themselves off if they get too hot. Also, try boot just on battery (no AC hooked up) and also try booting with just AC hooked up and take the battery out.

[rldelrosario]

good day all...

thanks for all your tips.... by some mystery, was able to boot on safe mode..... after countless tries, and so did the logical thing and saved all important files... so a clean reformat is in the horizon... am considering xp though.... again, thanks...