Vista Startup Repair Tool Saves The Day? Part 3 of 4.

If you followed me from Part 1 of 4, How to Fix a Crashed Computer, you know that after the computer crash the laptop was persistently booted into Vista System Recovery. Is that happening with your computer too?  The System Recovery Options screen came up every time for me and I tried all options available there except one, Windows Vista Startup Repair Tool.




I launched Windows Vista Startup Repair Tool. That looked like the only promising solution. I clicked on Launch Startup Repair. That "Startup Repair is Checking Your System for Errors" phase and especially the "Attemtping Repairs..." phase seemed like it took forever. It took maybe 20 minutes to complete, maybe 30 minutes.

Result?

Dang!

The message ensued: "Startup Repair can not repair this computer automatically."

I did run this repeatedly... with a bad hard disk you never know... But I always got the same message.

I started checking "Show Problem Details" report and I started taking notes. It showed a "corrupt file" problem.

I looked into "Diagnosis and Repair Details" which seems to be the detailed log of what the Startup Repair tried.

By scrolling through a lengthy report I found most of the tests passed with error codes 0x0 which is good. But one test stuck out with a non-zero error code:

System files integrity check and repair. Result: failed. Error Code 0x2, Time taken 762175 ms.

Boot critical file c:\windows\system32\drivers\euqvfx.sys is corrupt.

Repair action: File repair.

Result: Failed.

Error Code: 0x2.

Based on some advice on the internet, I tried running sfc /scannow from the System Repair Command Line. That gave "There is a system repair pending whcih requires reboot to complete. Reboot Windows and run sfc again". Sure enough, after reboot, sfc gave the very same answer... That is contradicting and definitely useless in this case!

I did numerous searches on the web to find out what else I could do. I even inserted the Acer eRecovery DVD Disk, getting ready to reinstall the entire system to factory default. I changed my mind in the last minute. The exercise with inserting a recovery disk while in System Repair was helpful though because I realized the entire file system is available to me.  The C: drive was available, the D: drive was available, and the DVD E: drive was available... so if I just had a good copy of euqfvx.sys, maybe copying it to the C: drive could do the trick.

By the way, the disk name that comes up by default when opening the command line window was called the X: disk, it probably refers to the hidden Vista Recovery Partition. Well at least the solid 8 Gbytes of hard disk space are good for something in a situation like that!

But I had no copy of Vista handy. What now? A Google search for euqvfx returns absolutely NOTHING!

In Part 3 of 4 you have seen how to use Windows Vista Startup Repair Tool inside the Vista System Recovery. You have seen that the dreaded "Startup Repair can not repair this computer automatically." message appeared, repeatedly. You have seen that maybe not all is lost as there was plenty of diagnostic information in the Windows Startup Repair Tool Log. In Part 4 of 4 you will see what else you can do if you get the message Vista Startup Repair Can Not Repair This Computer Automatically. Part 4 will show you the solution that worked like a charm for me!