Vista Boot Problem

32bit Vista Home Premium - I worked on this laptop about a month ago; it wasn't booting and turned out it was simply a corrupt Master Boot Record (MBR). Easy fix. I rebooted numerous times, ran a low-level hard drive diagnostic (Seagate SATA hard drive) and all was well. The client used the PC for 2 days w/o problems then left town. He came back to town on Nov27 and used the PC yesterday w/o problems, but today when powering on he got the "An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data". The Status of the error is 0xc000000f and the file is \BOOT\BCD. So I performed the same MBR repair that I did before, and the laptop booted to the desktop perfectly 3 or 4 times, then crashed again to the exact same error. So I ran the Seagate diagnostic again and again no problems found. I have followed most of the stuff listed in this link and in this link, and again the PC will boot OK maybe 5 times before erroring out again. Malware scans are clean, rootkit/bootkit scans are clean, MBRcheck reports the MBR is a std Vista boot record.... so what's going on here?

THX!

 

Sounds like data corruption / hard drive failure to me.

Will chkdsk /r complete? What about a high level hard drive diagnostic?

 

I have run numerous hard drive diagnostics and ALL passed 100% with no problems found. I did run chkdsk /r when I first worked on the PC back in late Oct or early Nov and it completed and did what is supposed to do w/o crashing or locking or erroring out. I'm running it again at this very moment, so I guess we'll see what happens (*fingers crossed*)

 

I have to say my first thought is also a bad HD despite the tests.

One thought is if it is booting to the System Reserved partition you could copy the boot files to the Vista partition and set that partition active. Thus bypassing the system reserved partition. (Or just set the Vista partition active and run Startup repair--running both automatic and then the one from the list of five options should create all necessary files to boot directly off the Vista partition).

That wouldn't rule out a problem with the MBR becoming corrupted but it might narrow it down to the MBR or (maybe boot sector?) becoming corrupted.

 

Yeah, I think the HD is dying. I installed a different drive with a clean OS and it runs perfectly. After 20+ restarts there have been ZERO boot problems. While rare, I have encountered hard drives that pass every diagnostic but they are still bad somehow, and this drive is another one. I'm backing up the client's data now while the drive is still somewhat alive.