I received an update alert for the Service Pack 1 update for Vista 2 days ago. I hit the update button and when I came back a few minutes later, it said I needed to reboot to initiate the changes. That was the last time my computer would boot correctly. At first I received the error code !!oxc0190036!!. When it went to the Sartup Error Test it said Root Cause Found: System Volume on disk is corrupt. I called Gateway and we tried to reboot the system off of the Operating System CD. It would not boot after that it would only give me the blue screen. Gateway told me I would have to do a System Restore and that I might lose all of the data on my hard drive. They suggested I call Micorsoft Tech Support. I have spent over 8 hours on the phone with Microsoft on 5 sperate occasions with no success.

I finally went to the Geek Squad at Best Buy to see what it would cost to recover the data from the hard drive. He told me that if I got a new hard drive I could reload the Vista on the new drive then power down the computer, reinstall the old drive and I should be able to recover the data on the old drive. Sounded like a good idea.

I was able to load the Vista on the new drive, but when I try to boot up the old drive, it goes into the blue screen and says something about doing a "data dump for a crash" and continues in a routine that acts like it is trying to reboot over and over.

I have tried to get into the BIOS to cofigure the second drive as a slave but I can't figure out how to do it. The drives are 320G Western Digital SATA drives and there are no jumpers to set for master to slave.

What am I missing? I really need to get the data off that old drive.

This post has been edited by jram723: Sep 19 2008, 10:16 PM

Hello,
The easyest way to do this is to buy a hard drive enclosure that connects to a USB port.
Than you can navigate to your data and transfer the data to your new hard drive.
If you need help with the data transfer please let me know.

I've had the SAME EXACT thing happen when i installed the Vista Service Pack 1. Is there any way to fix the error without starting from scratch with a new harddrive?

Vista is !#$#%!#!!!