Explorer goes into Crash Loop after unexpected power failure

[im_to_hyper]

Hey guys!

I haven't posted here in years, I don't think, but now I have no idea whats going on with my new aunt's new Windows Vista computer. Its an eMachines with Vista Home Premium on in it... 2GB RAM, AMD 64 processor, so a solid Vista system.

I was underneath the computer plugging in different peripherals and accidentally bumped the powerstrip. No problem, right? Wrong.

After turning it back on, the computer fails to boot. I get the start menu, the the desktop comes up, then I get a message that explorer has crashed, then it reloads, and the cycle repeats. Booting into Safe Mode gets the same result. It tells me to do harddisk error checking, but I can't even open up "Computer" to right-click on the harddrive icon!

I did manage, through the help dialog in safe mode, to boot msconfig, and i stopped mostly all the startup files from loading that are from 3rd party programs. Sadly, Explorer keeps crashing and re-loading no matter what I do. Even in Safe Mode, yes.

What was I doing when this happened? Installing iTunes, and copying music files over the network to this new computer. That's it.

Any help is greatly appreciated... thank you!!

[Rudnartim]

restore disk?

[im_to_hyper]

Yes I have a restore disk... but this computer has literally been out of the box for 3 hours... there are no other options?

[episode]

Boot from the restore disc or any Vista disc. Go through the option to go to the recovery console, and do fixboot and fixmbr

And maybe a chkdsk /f just to be sure

Edit: If its only three hours old, you want to do a restore. That way you don't have any residual problems from it. Since its new, don't you think it should be 100% perfect?

[RiverCampher]

  im_to_hyper said:

Yes I have a restore disk... but this computer has literally been out of the box for 3 hours... there are no other options?

Try creating a new user? Possibly some damage has happened to the registry.. If it were me and only been up for 3 hours, I'd reinstall it rather than risk having an unstable OS as I load more stuff onto it.

[ChopSuey]

  im_to_hyper said:

Yes I have a restore disk... but this computer has literally been out of the box for 3 hours... there are no other options?

It sounds like your hard drive was storing information at the time the power got shut off. If that happened, then there is a good chance that the some of data on your hard drive became corrupted (especially if the hard drives are hooked up in a RAID configuration). You can try using the restore option on your Windows Vista DVD in order to restore the system files (this way, you won't lose any data on your computer).

Here is a link that might help you:

Using System Restore from the Vista Windows Recovery Environment

Good luck!

[im_to_hyper]

Eek sorry I meant three days... I've been on it for three hours, however. But yes, I suppose using the restore discs is the best option at this point in time. I will try the fixboot thing, since they already copied their files over from the old hard drive, and haven't backed anything up yet.

Will post results soon.

[im_to_hyper]

Running Chkdisk now... doing the other recovery options mentioned above did not work.

[im_to_hyper]

Thanks everyone who helped out... running chkdisk found and repaired one bad sector, which must have been the problem, but i also did the other two (fixmbr and fixboot) just to be sure!

Thanks again! Hopefully this issue will be fixed someday soon... I don't remember anything doing this in XP when a power failure happened.