Windows Vista "System disabled"

The hardware is an HP Pavilion dv9000 and WAS running Vista Home Premium. Without any previous announcement, the last time it was working, it popped up a message "System Disabled" and went dead.

Now, when you turn it on, it runs through the HP flash screen, shows the F-key options, then goes black with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner and nothing responds. It does the same if you try F8 to get to the Safe Mode, etc. but it WILL recognize F10 and other bios-related functions and go there. In short, it will not run any Microsoft System related functions. I opened the HD from a Mini XP on CD and was able to see everything on the HD, and the same with loading Ubuntu from CD. So I know the hardware and HD are OK.

What happened to Vista, and what can I do about it? Can I re-install from a recovery disc? I have the recovery disc for a dv6000 from HP, the same version of Vista, would that work? The recovery files appear to be on the D:/ drive but I don't see any way of actually running an install to put them back into the proper locations. Or, can I simply upgrade to Win7 (using Upgrade, not Full Install, too expensive) without actually being able to run Vista beforehand?

I tried to contact Microsoft, but they want $50 just to answer the phone or read my email message.

 

HP should be your first point of contact, it's not worth upgrading it to W7 until you're ruled out any hardware/BIOS bugs. If the HP DVD is for the same range of models (same chipset and BIOS type) and the same Vista version, running a repair install should work out fine - providing the original problem is purely a rare Windows glitch and you've checked for silly errors like the time/date in the BIOS being correct.

 

Hi,

I'm not certain but everything I have seen about HP recovery discs is they only work on specific models and are not Windows installation discs but only have the option of formatting the disc and reinstalling the OS.

The blinking cursor at the top left could indicate a problem with the MBR since it isn't even trying to start Windows or is looking in the wrong place.

I think it might be worth a try to download the Vista repair disc and try startup repair to see if you can get a more informative error or possibly boot into Vista. You have to use a torrent program to download the ISO and then burn the ISO to disc using imgburn or similar burning software. http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/download-windows-vista-x64-recovery-disc/

If you need more details let me know.

 

One other thought is does mini XP have disk management? You might take a look at the HD in that and check the partitions. You probably have a system reserved of about 100mb and a large C: partition--which of those two is set as active, boot? (There are probably a recovery and HP tool partition but one of the other two should be active.)