Windows Vista Will Not Boot: Troubleshoot Windows Vista Bootup Problems

Slow Vista bootup

We first look at situations when Vista will boot, but it takes an extremely long time for the system to be available.

Here are articles from a series on 21 tips to Speed up Vista, by Dianna Monda Dill. Boost Vista Startup Time is aimed at decreasing the amount of time it takes to bootup your Vista system. It considers the many automatic services which slow down bootup time- and which ones you really need to run when you boot your computer. Another helpful article from this series is Manage Startup Time- a guide about disabling programs which don’t need to be run during the startup process, and how to disable them.

Vista boot ups which don’t work

Windows Vista Mouse Frozen: An Article by Persona which deals with booting up Vista and finding out your mouse is frozen, making it so that you can do nothing in Vista. There are a number of solution given for unfreezing your mouse, so you can use your Vista OS.

Windows Vista won’t Boot or Only Starts in Safe Mode: by Warren Hiyashi. This article addresses both situations where your computer will not boot at all, or when it only boots in Safe Mode. He explains how to use Safe Mode to run System Restore, to return to a point where your computer was working correctly, and then determining the culprit which caused the problem. He also explains how to use the Startup Repair tool in Safe Mode to run diagnostic tests to identify the problem.

Vista won’t let you start your computer

There can be different causes for a system crashing, but when you can not even start the computer in Safe Mode, you need a Vista Recovery disk.

First, how to make a recovery disk

How to create a Vista Recovery Disk for Hard Drive Recovery: by Dianna Monda Dill. If you can not start your computer using the normal methods, you will need a Vista Recovery disk to get into your system to work on problems. Here are instructions for creating a recovery disk. This utility is available on the Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions.

Once you have your Vista Recovery Disk, Dianna’s article How to Perform a Hard Drive Recovery Using Vista’s Complete PC Restore will guide you through the process of recovering your hard drive and completely restoring your system from a crash. Again, this utility is only available on the Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions.

Many of us do not have a Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise edition of Vista. Since Dianna’s articles only deal with the high end editions of Vista, Lamar Stonecypher has written an article on ways to Create a Bootable DVD or CD in Vista for editions of Vista like Vista Home Basic, and Vista Home Premium, which do not come with the ability to create a recovery disc. He provides three methods of making a bootable disc which allow you to bootup Vista in the case of catastrophic hard disk failure. He also links to his article on various methods of backing up Vista so you can make sure you have copies of the material on the inaccessible hard drive before you can not boot up Vista or suffer catastrophic failure.

Four Boot Disks to Help you recover from System Failure by Peter N, has a section on a Vista Recovery disk. The contents of the disk were released with a beta version of Microsoft Vista SP1, but were not included in the final version distributed through Windows Updates. He gives you a link to a site which has a download of the Windows Recovery tool. You will need to burn the .iso file to a disk before you can use it to access the repair environment. It is not an installation disk.

Other problems which can mean Windows Vista will not boot up

Have you overclocked your computer- and now Windows Vista won’t boot? In When Overclocking Doesn’t Quite Work, J F Amprimoz explains how to use BIOS to fix this, or, if you can’t even get into BIOS, how to reset CMOS on your motherboard to return your system to its original BIOS default state.

Is it possible you have a problem with your hardware? In her five article series, Computer Troubleshooting- If your Computer will not Turn on, Jesma discusses various mechanical problems which may be causing the problem. Each article shows you how to troubleshoot a different part of your computer hardware.

Bright Hub hopes this collection of articles from their knowledgeable writers will troubleshoot all your Windows Vista boot up problems.