[ocampos]

I am working on a student laptop at my workplace, and she has Windows Vista (Home Premium 32-bit) on a Dell Inspiron 1520. The Windows Boot Manager comes up with the following error:

File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data.

It suggests popping in the installation cd and using the "Repair your computer" option.
So it asks:

"Windows found problems with your computer's startup options. Do you want to apply repairs and restart your computer?" So I click on Repair and Start, and then get this:

"Failed to save startup options"

So do I just give up on trying to repair it and just reinstall Windows, or doe anyone know of a solution?

[horsecharles]

See if this can help you to avoid reinstalling / restoring to a usually too early point: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392/en-us

[ocampos]

I tried that, but it didn't work. So here's what I ended up doing:

I took out the hard drive, hooked it up to one of our computers running XP, and did a check disk on it. I slapped the hard drive back in the laptop and Vista started right up!

[Elvandil]

You may have a drive on its last legs there. Better test it and warn the user to always back things up.

[horsecharles]

One of my pet peeves today is how they've done away with a lot of fans / ventilation openings / space altogether.
Cases tend to be tiny & hermetically-shut.
Hard & disc drives especially work under pressure-- the fronts of cases don't have fans anymore, not even ventilation slots.

I have no problem with modding holes in front / sides(or just removing one entire side panel), adding extra fans, opening up unused rear slots...

Rant Over.