Vista System Recovery. How To Fix a Crashed Computer and Recover Hard Drive Data. Part 2 of 4.

If your Vista will not boot and goes into Vista System Recovery every time on boot, pay close attention. You may just be able to fix the hard disk, boot normally, and recover your hard drive data after you are finished reading this post. Similar solution may apply for Windows 7 systems.



If your Vista will not boot and goes into Vista System Recovery every time on boot, pay close attention. You may just be able to fix the hard disk, boot normally, and recover your hard drive data after you are finished reading this post.

We talked about the BSOD crash. It was causing my laptop Windows Vista will not boot properly but instead consistently booting into Vista System Recovery. We asked How to fix a crashed computer? What to do when you are persistently booted into your Vista System Recovery and System Recovery Options screen comes up?

I have ACER Aspire 5570Z laptop by the way, with 2 Gigs of RAM and Vista Home Premium.

What to do while in Vista System Recovery?

I tried the option: Restore to an earlier point in time. It did not work as the computer declared there was no restore point available! [What? I thought I made several restore points. In fact everytime I do a Vista Automatic Update the computer creates a restore point. Why was none available?]

Inside Vista System Recovery I went into the command prompt known as cmd.exe when Vista is up fully. The command prompt is available as the last option in System Recovery. I did a thorough Disk Check using dskchk. It showed everything was fine with the hard drive, it found NO errors. Still, something is preventing Vista from booting. I still need to fix the hard disk to fix the crashed computer and recover data on the hard drive.

I ran the memory test that was available as one of the options in Vista System Recovery, and that ran just fine too. So memory is fine and the hard drive is fine. What now?

The remaining options in Vista System Recovery Options looked destructive. They would wipe out my data. Even though I do backup some of my most important data, I knew I would have lost some data on the drive D:, some recent photos and settings of my Firefox. So while I could have gone with the ACER e Recovery Disk 1 and e Recovery Disk 2 that I had, that would mean installing Vista to factory settings and not recover my hard drive data.

This would be like going back in time 2 years. Scary. It would take another day to get it all together to roughly the present state as far as software installations.

So far, Part 1 and Part 2 of this four part Series, we found that, after the bad system crash, none of the options available through F8 worked. Also, all options in Vista System Recovery either failed or failed to find any errors. All options but one.

There is another option in Vista System Recovery  that I was able to run. Vista Startup Repair Tool.

Read more in Part 3 of 4: Vista System Recovery: Vista Startup Repair Tool Saves The Day?