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What To Do When Windows Vista Crashes: Page 7 of 10

No installation disk? Then restart your computer, press F8. This will get you to an "Advanced Boot Options" menu, from which you can "next" your way to the "Systems Recovery Options" menu. See Step 3 of this Knowledge Base note from Microsoft for more.

When in doubt, if you can't get it to start, reboot, but don't hold down the F8 key; that won't do anything. Instead, repeatedly press "F8" as if you're an impatient person who can't wait for something to happen (which you actually are). This'll get you to the "Advanced Boot Options" menu.

The Little-Known Boot-Repair Command

I know what you're thinking: If I could restart my f&%$#&^ing computer, I wouldn't need no stinkin' backup disks. I realize this is circuitous reasoning, but if you can't get your computer to boot up, then you've got a boot problem.

True, Vista no longer relies heavily on a boot.ini file. (Indeed, it no longer has a boot.ini file) Rather, Vista maintains a sophisticated tally of what it's supposed to load at startup in something called a Boot Configuration Data store. The BCD is more precisely a list of boot options; that list is made up of Boot Configuration Data elements and objects.

It's a vast oversimplification, but when you can't boot up, the problem typically involves a bad BCD store. (At a lower level, your BIOS could have trouble loading and/or the Master Boot Record could be corrupted.)

On the path to Bootrec, the

On the path to Bootrec, the "System Recovery Options" box should identify your current Vista installation as the OS designated for repair.

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As I explained at the top of this article, it's my sense that boot problems of the sort which plagued Windows XP users, and which Fred Langa expounded upon so eloquently, are pretty much a thing of the past. I'm speaking of bad or missing hal.dll files, and the whole class of trashed startup files and dll's in general. Indeed, I couldn't trash hal.dll for the purposes of this test, something that was easy to do in the old days. That tells me that Microsoft has built tougher protections into Vista.

Of course, most crashes can be solved by a simple restart. However, rarer and serious incidents may corrupt the Boot Configuration Data file and render Vista unstartable. From my research, it appears that most problems like this occur when people have set up, or tried to set up, dual-boot systems.

How do you know there's bad Boot Configuration Data? When you start up and get an error message which reads: "The Windows Boot Configuration Data file is missing required information."

Fortunately, if and when this occurs, Microsoft has a tool to help. With Vista, it's called Bootrec, rather than the Bootcfg moniker used when Langa popularized it for XP. With Vista, the command sequence also is slightly different. However, the ultimate goal is the same: Repair a bad Master Boot Record, boot sector, or BCD store, and get your system to restart normally.