Technology

This morning I was presented with a Vista laptop that had gone belly up. The computer would fail on boot, briefly showing a blue screen and then power cycling. Trying to start in Safe Mode didn't work. Neither did any of the options in that menu. The error message on the blue screen was STOP: 0X0000C1F5. A quick Google search resulted in a few different opinions - everything from "the harddrive is toast" to "corrupt kernal - wipe the computer". Pretty much all of them said that the data was irretrievable.

Follow up:

I did a harddrive scan from the BIOS. That test reported no problems with the harddrive.

I tried booting from an Ubuntu disk. It came up fine, but I could not get the Windows drive to mount. Back to Google.

I found a detailed blog post at Delmartian Technologies of a repair plan for the same problem, written by Tom Karpowitz. Click here to read the full detailed post with 17 steps.

At a high level, all I had to do was create a boot disk of System Rescue CD, use that disk to get rid of a corrupt $TxfLog file, and then use a Windows Vista installation disk to repair the startup.

Even if the Vista repair hadn't worked, fixing the difficulty mounting with System Rescue would have made it possible to copy all the data via Linux.

Thank you Mr. Karpowitz.