Help!!! Dell inspiron 9300 will no longer boot vista!

Okay, so I have been using vista beta 2 for about three months, and It has been working great for a beta. I was using my dell inspiron 9300 last night, everything was fine and I shut my computer down. 15 minuets later, I started it back up again, the screen showed the dell logo and dell loading bar as usual, then the screen went black and my computer just sat there, and still does the same thing when I try it again. I dont know what to do. I have let it just sit there with a black screen hoping that it will continue to load for up to 30 minuets, and nothing happens. I have tried pressing F8 to run it in safe mode, the key isnt recognized, and it continues to load. Can anyone help me get past this stupid black screen? I have run diagnostics on everything and all tests pass as if nothing is wrong. I have the same visrion of vista on my Dell xps and it is working flawlessly. I dont know what to do. Dell support says I need to format my entire hard drive and start from square one again deleting all my family photos from the past five years and all my music and videos. I really do not want to do that, so does anyone know of anything else I can do?

Do you have the Vista cd? (either ordered or burned). I'm not sure what, if anything, has changed with recovery console. Recovery console is a command prompt-based UI... a emulation of DOS. If you have the cd, put it in, (you may have to boot to the optical drive) and try to enter the recovery console from there. Set up a external or some other storage media (desktop is fine). And transfer all the files (pics, music, videos, etc.) to the desktop. Then try to have the recovery console repair the install. I say to transfer your files first, because the repair program on the cd is alittle messed up (from other's POV). Worst case, you'll have to kill the partition. I highly recommend writing zero's to the drive. Vista's BCD (boot.ini in XP), likes to fiddle with the mbr. Writing zero's to the drive erases the mbr too.

Sounds like there is a OS level boot error, god only knows where, since you don't have a error log. Beta 2 is really a release that needs to be installed on a seprate HD, PC, or atleast partition. Cause it is buggy.

"bs2009" wrote:

In case it is something with your video drivers, have you tried using the up key and hitting enter (assuming that it is on the logon screen and this will highlight the first id and that you have no password for it, otherwise enter the password before hitting enter) Wait long enought for the computer to get to the logon screen first. If you hear the music, you have a clue that the video drivers are the problem. Check the Vista dvd to see what tools will let you get to the hd to copy off your data.

"bs2009"

In article , bs2009@discussions.microsoft.com says...The first thing you should try to do is get your important files backed up. If you can successfully boot from a DVD drive then you should be able to do this. An external USB drive works well for backup and isn't that expensive. Then if you have to follow Dell's advice it won't be a problem.

You want to make a backup before you go any further. Do you have an external USB drive? You could boot to a CD with a disk imaging program, or BartPE and copy your data to the USB drive.

-- Kerry BrownMS-MVP Windows-Shell/Userwww.vistahelp.ca/forum/Forum.htm

"bs2009"