Vista Black Screen of Death

[kladner]

Originally Posted by chalsall

One thing which is always advised when doing this kind of thing (if you haven't already) is to back everything up (either through a network connection, or to an external USB drive).

As it appears you can boot into Linux you could use such an environment to mount the internal harddrive then rsync / scp everything to another machine, or simply mount the USB drive and "cp -ra /[INTERNAL]/ /[EXTERNAL]/[BACKUP_DIR]/".

(My apologise if I'm telling you how to chew gum...)

An excellent point, which I overlook far too often.

[wombatman]

Originally Posted by chalsall

One thing which is always advised when doing this kind of thing (if you haven't already) is to back everything up (either through a network connection, or to an external USB drive).

As it appears you can boot into Linux you could use such an environment to mount the internal harddrive then rsync / scp everything to another machine, or simply mount the USB drive and "cp -ra /[INTERNAL]/ /[EXTERNAL]/[BACKUP_DIR]/".

(My apologise if I'm telling you how to chew gum...)

It never hurts to be reminded! I've done a backup of non-system files already, but I'll double-check and make sure that person has everything they want before I do the repair install attempt, just in case things go awry.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by kladner

You can do a Repair reinstall, aka In Place Upgrade, I think. It is unfortunate that you can't launch Setup from the GUI, but it may let you do a repair run if you boot from an optical drive.

Originally Posted by chalsall

One thing which is always advised when doing this kind of thing (if you haven't already) is to back everything up (either through a network connection, or to an external USB drive).

I have done a Repair install on this current machine once. It did the trick for the problem that I had.

[wombatman]

That's good to know. Hopefully this recovery disk can do the repair install.