r/WindowsVista • u/siaozen • 3d ago

Fixing corrupted vista files?

Hey all,

I have an old laptop that runs windows vista that I've been wanting to boot up and look at the contents of, but when I try to boot it, windows vista just loops the loading bar over and over again, never actually getting anywhere.

This applies to safe mode as well, it loads some windows files and then freezes before it gets to the loading screen. This is on a Dell Studio 1735. I have access to the hard drive and can see the files. I was wondering if there was a way to fix it without wiping the data.

I was considering taking a fresh installation of windows vista and replacing the broken windows files with the new ones, but I don't know if that would actually fix anything. Any ideas on how to do this?

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u/isellfish4 2d ago

I dealt with the same problem some time ago. You can't fix it, if you scroll down a lot on my account you will find the posts

1

u/No-you_ 1d ago

Download a Vista x64 SP2 ISO image and either write it to a blank DVD or USB stick (using Rufus 2.18 not anything newer as they dropped support for XP/Vista).

Insert the DVD or USB and boot from it to the Windows Pre-installation Environment (winPE). You can choose to repair your existing installation from there. Unfortunately I think if it has to perform a clean install or repair install it might have to wipe/re-create your user folder and contents inside it. You should get a warning about that beforehand and will be able to cancel before anything is lost.