How to repair a driver problem on Vista when it won't even boot

Szymon Kobalczyk was having fun with the 64-bit version of Vista.  That is until he tried to install a game called Price of Persia: the two thrones.  The machine won't even boot now!  But most likely all is not lost.  If you find yourself in this kind of pickle then getting back to a restore point using System Restore is a great thing to try.  Here's two ways to do that:

First plan of attack is to try to boot to Safe Mode, which is done from the boot menu that comes up by pressing F8 right after the POST initialization is done during the first part of boot.  This is right after the machine beeps.  (If your machine beeps during boot!)  Once booted and logged on, you may want to try finding the specific driver that is giving all the grief and killing it.  This can be done in MSCONFIG.  But another more straightforward option is to bring the registry back into a previous state, which can be done with System Restore from Control Panel / Backup and Restore Center.  The first task listed at the left should be the right one, "Repair Windows using System Restore".  Pick the most recent entry, which should be right before you installed the bunged driver.

Another option to get into System Restore if even Safe Mode doesn't work is to boot with the Vista DVD, select your language, click "Install" (but don't worry, you won't really be doing an install), and then press SHIFT-F10.  You'll be at a command prompt.  (Or at least this works with the 32-bit version of Vista.)  Type RSTRUI, and up should come the normal System Restore program, and it should be able to restore the SYSTEM hive of the registry back to what it should be.

There are many other utilities you can run when booted into the WinPE environment used by Vista's installer.


Feedback

# re: How to repair a driver problem on Vista when it won't even boot

Or you could just follow the prompt at the attempted start up and repair ur vista, nothings lost only the pop t2t install. 4/26/2007 5:16 AM | dan

# re: How to repair a driver problem on Vista when it won't even boot

i install ultimate yesterday i was installiing gforce 6200. everytime i tried to install.. the installation always froze. and i dl the update from nvidia itself. so toldme to restart. i restrat and its said missing file/ no hard drive. always error. i went to bios its recognize as new drive. but when i tried to install the whole thing again i cant its said cant install cause hd error. sucks.. can u help me? 4/27/2007 3:25 AM | uchup

# re: How to repair a driver problem on Vista when it won't even boot

I had a program try to install it's drivers, but booting up normally and CTRLALTDEl'ing RunDll helped get rid of the problem so I could uninstall. 7/20/2007 7:08 AM | Kman

# re: How to repair a driver problem on Vista when it won't even boot

I have the exact same problem as uchup, no safe mode no nothing 7/26/2007 5:41 PM | 55

# re: How to repair a driver problem on Vista when it won't even boot

I have a problem with the built in wireless lan card on a packard bell laptop, the driver installs but there is a code 10 error which wont let the wireless card initiate and i have tried rolling back the driver and reinstalling the driver and downloading the driver off of windows update and the packard bell support website, can anyone advise me on how to fix this problem? 8/30/2008 10:05 AM | sharkymrash

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