Everything was great for a couple months and then one day I came home and found my husband finishing up a system restore on my computer. One of the kids had been playing a video game and a Windows Protection Error had occurred and I didn't even ask what had ensued, but the system restore seemed to have fixed it.
Everything was great again for a couple more months until last night and both my husband and I are at a loss as to what to do to try to recover my system.
My son was playing a video game and the computer locked up. I manually shut it down and restarted it but instead of loading Windows it said it couldn't find the boot record. I restarted it again. After a couple more 'No Boot Record's, I noticed that on the initial start-up screen it said 'Pri Master - Not Found.' Crap, it's not seeing the hard drive!
So, I went into BIOS and easy as pie it refound the hard drive. I saved and exited, and got to the 'Improper Shutdown Detected' Scandisk run, where it froze partway through.
Restarted again and got the No Boot Record, went back into BIOS, showed it the hard drive, froze on the Scandisk, restarted, No Boot Record, BIOS, etc. Twice I managed to actually load Windows and login and get to my desktop. The first time it even successfully loaded everything and was usable, but it had loaded VEEEEEERRRRRRYYYYY slowly and I didn't trust it to be stable so i stupidly rerstarted it again and was unable to get back in successfully again. I kept trying a few more times but realized that it was now consistently seeing the hard drive but still not getting anywhere.
Everytime I restarted it dumped me to the 'Windows failed to load last time' screen with 4 options.
If I tried to go into Safe Mode, it restarted itself.
If I tried to start in Normal Mode, it froze on the title screen.
If I tried to start with Step by Step Confirmation, it got to msmouse.vdx and whether I entered Y or N it crashed. We tried the registry solutions we found when googling this file, but to no avail.
Mixed in with all those crashes it sometimes showed me a Windows Protection Error instead of simply restarting. One of those Windows Protection Errors pointed a finger at Vcache (another virtual driver, like msmouse.vdx).
In desperation I told my husband to go ahead and wipe the System partition and reinstall Windows.
It seems that the C drive is now wiped, but when we try to install Windows it freezes while loading the setup files!!!!!!!!
We are now at a total loss. Wiping and reinstalling Windows has always been a successful last resort option in the past and we have no idea what to do next.
Any suggestions??
Edited by Celebrine, 14 November 2005 - 02:13 PM.