Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
2 Posts
0
3021
Vista Home Pro and NAV 2010 crashed the OS - Help!
Typically I'm pretty good with stuff, however, today hasn't been so successful.
I'm adding NAV 2010 to my daughter's Inspiron 1525 (05/08). I had purchased NAV when I had delivery of the PC but her college campus IT folks removed it because it wasn't compatible with their network and whatever they were using. Daughter is no longer living on campus, and turned over her pc to me to replace / repair / reprogram as necessary.
This laptop is running Vista Home Pro, and I downloaded NAV 2010 which began it's install, and tempted to Scan when the whole PC went down. After that, when I booted up Vista goes in to a System Startup process, which it fails, and gives me an option to Startup Repair (which it hasn't repaired after several attempts), System Restore (it longer recognizes the latest restore point created a week ago), Windows Complete PC Restore, Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool (the only thing that checked out well today), a Comman Prompt, and Dell Factory Image Restore. Which one should I try next?
I have a couple of questions. If I restore Windows Vista Home back to the original installation, do I loose data files that are currently stored under My Documents? Softare updates are no big deal, but the data loss would be significant.
Thanks for any and all guidance ;)
joe53
1 Rookie
1 Rookie
•
5.8K Posts
0
January 8th, 2010 21:00
Hi Holly1961, and welcome;
Can you boot into Safe Mode during bootup? Instructions are here (see page 2):
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2246&page=1
It involves tapping theF8 key, and can be tricky.
If you can, don't attempt to fix anything yet. I don't use Vista, but someone will be along to help.
Just a few more questions: did you uninstall the antivirus the college had loaded prior to attempting to install Norton? Do you recall which AV it was, and was it up to date?
Was the PC working well prior to your attempt to install NAV, or were you concerned about possible infection?
iroc9555
1K Posts
0
January 9th, 2010 06:00
Hi Holly.
First follow Joe's advised.
If you restore Vista to original installation, call: " Restoring Your Computer's Software To Factory Settings ". You will lose all data; Documents, images, movies, E-Mails ( if you are using Outlook or any third prog mail). You laptop will be as it came out of the box when you got it. You will have to reinstall a new AV to begin with since the AV that came with the laptop might be outdated. Reinstall any driver you updated in the past (BIOS and Firmwares are not lost). Update Microsoft security patches and so.
Hope this helps
Holly1961
2 Posts
0
January 9th, 2010 12:00
Thanks guys! I tried getting to Safe Mode but it wouldn't allow me to get there because it flew by the window. There had been successful Dell Online Backups so I'll pull the deleted info back from there. I got permission from my daughter that if it meant losing the data.. then so be it. She also backs up to an external Passport drive.
Good question regarding the campus AV software. I didn't consider that at all.
When I did the Dell Factory Image Restore everything came back as it should.
Thanks for being there!! :emotion-13:
Holly
joe53
1 Rookie
1 Rookie
•
5.8K Posts
0
January 9th, 2010 13:00
Glad you resolved it Holly, and thanks for reporting back.
Hopefully the backups preserved most of your daughter's files. In future, she might want to consider getting a 3rd party backup imaging program such as Acronis True Image, which makes recovery of one's system and personal files from an external source a snap in situations like these.