[Flaxxie]

okay, long story made short I need to get my Vista machine fired again so that I can save my kids' pictures including my Daughter's Make a Wish trip (she had leukemia) before we reformat the nightmare and start over. I've had to buy a bootable disk download that had repair options as my Vista disk did not have repair options included. I've tried the startup repair which failed multiple times and gives me the following in the log:
Root cause found:
Boot configuration corrupt
Repair action: partition table repair
Result: failed error code =0x490
So I have found some instructions to do the repair but I'm not real confident I understand what I need to do to actually get the correct result. I'm sorry guys, but I think I need some hand holding. As I understand the bootable doesn't contain the file I'll need, I'm not sure my Vista disk does. HELP!
Vista is the original operating system on this machine so I can't backup to XP or anything like that.
Help would be appreciated more than I can even explain.

Thanks in advance,
Flaxxie

[Saga Lout]

Hello and welcome to TSG Forums.

Most importantly, to take out the files you want in case this system is about to fall over completely, buy a cheap USB converter or dock to enable you to slave your hard disk to another machine. E-Bay will have them and they're well worth having - just make sure you get the right converter - either for a SATA disk or IDE (PATA).

While the disk is in there, run Checkdisk with both find and fix boxes ticked to see if that overcomes disk problems. As an alternative, you could download and burn to disk a LiveCD version of a Linux Operating System to allow access to retrieve the files but that won't allow the Checkdisk examination.