Vista Stuck in System Repair on Reboot

My dad just handed me down a machine running Windows Vista. We booted just fine at his house. I had a monitor error, then it somehow got stuck in system repair mode on reboot. I got into the command prompt from the system restore and tried deleting the pending file from c:windows\winsxs\, but there is no pending file, nor a cleanup file to delete. It won't start in safe mode and there is no system restore point. I keep running into the error "There is a system repair pending which requires a reboot to complete." Restarting just brings me back to the same point over and over. Endless loop.

Hello, gino5555

I will be attempting to assist you in any way I can with your issue.

To start off, does your system have a Recovery Partition or come with a Recovery Disk Set?

Nope, the machine did not come with any disks. I don't need anything on the machine. I do have an unopened Win XP Home Recovery disc.

Unfortunately, a Windows Xp Recovery disk will not help with getting past the error we are encountering with Vista.

However if that recovery disk was made for that computer and your are willing to downgrade the operating system Not Recommended

I would like for you to go back to c:\windows\winsxs\ while in command prompt and perform the following command:

attrib

The pending file may be hidden. That command will allow you to see that file if it is in fact hidden.

if the file does exist:

attrib - h 

from there you can delete that file and restart.

There was no file titled pending that was there. The disk belongs to a different machine that I have, but is no longer functional.

Was that disk made for this computer? If not I do not recommend using that disk to recover your system. Instead you can access the manufacturer's website and try to locate the recovery disk for that particular system.

It was made for a different system. This is an hp Pavillion a6430f PC

You can access the manufacturer's website and try to locate the recovery disk for that particular system.

so you would look for it on http://support.hp.com

According to the manual, there is a Recovery Partition on the hard drive you can use to restore the computer to it's Factory installed state. Follow the directions for System Recovery at System Startup. 📎SysRec.jpg

F11 will also take you directly to the hard drive recovery partition.

That's what the image I posted said.

That's what the image I posted said.

*facepalm*

I am very sorry x3

The bad part is I have one sitting right next to me…

Nothing worked. I ended up going into the boot/bios menu and resetting everything to default. Then it went into system recovery. There were still alot of errors so I went back using the instructions above the restored to factory. This problem solved! Now I'm having an issue with getting the Outlook Express Email to transfer. I can transfer it find to my Windows Live 11 on my Win 7 machine, but the mail is for my husband. Vista loaded Windows Mail, not Live Mail. I'm doing the system updates then I'll try to install Windows Live Mail. Not sure if maybe this is a Vista issue.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows…essentials-home

This should get you Windows Live Mail

That one won't work…Operating system: 32- or 64-bit version of Windows 7, or 32- or 64-bit version of Windows 8 Release Preview, or Windows Server 2008 R2.

I did find the link for Windows 2011 which was Vista compatible. Trying that now.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/de…s.aspx?id=29219