Vista 32-bit hangs on start-up before login

I was working with chaslang on the malware side because I got attacked last week when I opened an attachment to an email I thought was from the post office. I shut everything down, but I think it was too late. Next time when I went to reboot the computer it hung on the blue Windows screen (with the swirly lines) just before the login page.

I am running Windows Vista Business, 32-bit. I can start in Safe Mode with networking. I have tried repairing the computer and System Restore to a date prior to opening the attachment. Neither worked. When I was working with chaslang on the malware removal, I remember one screen saying "tcpip6.sys not found", if that is of any importance.

Then, on Friday, after running chkdsk, the machine booted. I thought my troubles were over. Until I rebooted again on Sunday and got the same hang on the same page.

Toshiba wants $30 in "shipping and handling" for new system disks. And that buys me a 7-10 day turnaround!! I have backed up all the important data and am prepared to reinstall Windows.

Chaslang found a system recovery partition on my HDD so again I thought maybe I could avoid Toshiba. But when I start making DVDs, the first DVD gave me an error code: 0E01B5-26-000444D9.

Can you help, or am I going to Toshiba? I really don't want to. But this dang computer is frustrating every effort I make to get it going again. I'd appreciate whatever you can do. Thanks for reading this far, and any help you might be able to provide.

 

Instead of making DVD's for the restore, can you boot directly into the recovery partition using the following procecure?

 

Thanks, Tgell, for the idea. I did what you suggested. The computer restarted and I was given 2 choices -- erase HDD or reset to factory out-of-the-box settings. I chose the factory settings and got an(other) error msg.!!! This time it was error 06-0204-0000.

Keep trying, man! I am not ready to give up yet!! What about erasing the HDD?

 

Seems like a lot of people get this error but nobody seems to know what it means. The closest I got was that the error was due to something about looking for a partition. If you erase the hard drive, I am not sure if that would also wipe your recovery partition or not. Then you would have no chance at recovery. I would also be hesitant to delete your primary partition and create a new one because it might have some modified MBR that is needed for your recovery partition. Hopefully somebody here can jump in here and help.

 

Can you go into Event Viewer and see if there are any errors flagged? And, do you have any kind of BIOS or Hard Disk password enabled?

 

Well. I don't know what to say!! Tried to recover default factory settings again like you suggested ('0' key while turning power on). Got another error. So did a hard restart using the power key, walked away, and when I came back it started up!

It did this Friday morning after running chkdsk. Then hung up on a restart Sun. morning. Now it is working again. I definitely do not know what to make of this. I have looked at Event Viewer. There are 20 errors in the past hour -- all of them event ID 3013 - Search - Application.

Even though my computer is working in regular mode, I definitely do not feel like anything has been done to fix it. While I have it powered up and fully accessible, are there scans or something I can do to look for bad sectors, bad files, bad whatevers....without causing a reboot?

Thanks. Sorry to make this so difficult! rolleyes

 

I couldn't post the list of errors in the Event Viewer in time, so here they are:

event ID 7 cdrom 368 errors
10 WMI 2
19 PrintSpooler 4
4609 EventSystem 2
6008 EventLog 2
7000, 7001, 7011 Service Control Manager Eventlog Provider Multiple
10000 WLAN AutoConfig 1
10005 DistributedCom 7

Hope that helps you find something wrong. I will scan as well and let you know if it finds anything.