laptop stuck in Recovery Mode

[Anca Dumitrache]

My brand new HP laptop is stuck in Recovery Mode. Whenever I try to boot it, it opens the Recovery menu. If I hit Cancel, it just reboots and enters it again. I got the laptop with just Vista, and I installed the latest gnome Ubuntu on it. In the boot loader I had two choices corresponding to Vista. I usually chose the first, but after choosing the second, this happened. Now it won't even open Grub. Is there anything I can do, or do I need to make a complete system recovery?

[Paul McCleary]

Hi,

Not so sure with vista, but with XP you could boot of the CD in recovery console mode and run fixmbr, which should sort out the MBR you've broken installing Ubuntu.

Hope this helps,
Paul

[Glenn S. Davidson]

Sounds like there was a device difference between the 2 vista selections and now you've corrupted the "good" selection. I think you are going to have to run the recovery from the CD (or recovery partition) to see if you can repair it.

More than likely it'll be easier to just restore the laptop to factory and then re-install Ubuntu. If you make it back to the same place with 2 Vista selections I would suggest going in and deleting the second selection. Do this before trying to customize everything.

An easy way to verify which one to delete is to rename one of them and reboot.

There are some utilities that can help with this. I haven't used Vista in a while but if you find the system properties (Right click 'My Computer' and select properties on XP) and see if there is an "Advanced" tab you should find a "Startup and recovery" section where you can edit the file.

Please understand that editing this file can render your PC un-bootable so don't get frustrated and plan for an all day job.