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I have a Gateway LX6810-01 Vista HP 64Bit w/nVidia chipset. The computer will no longer completely boot into Windows (not even safe mode) - I get to the bar along the bottom, then the mouse shows, then the screen goes black. Vista disk will not repair as it does not see the OS. After days of troubleshooting, I decided to throw a different HDD in and reinstall the OS, and voila! Everything works fine. Now, the nVidia chipset drivers had to be installed during the Vista install process (Step 2) and so I am positive this is the issue with the original HDD/OS install - the nVidia chipset drivers are corrupted and that's the problem. So, my question is, how can I repair the nVidia chipset drivers on the original installation, so I can use my original HDD again, with all my data on it please? I can't use this other HDD as it is way too small But how to repair the drivers when I can't boot into Windows?
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What do you mean "it won't boot"? Where does the boot fail? If the boot fails at the self test stage, there is not much you can do at the software level.
Heat damage is hard to troubleshoot, the troubleshoot and repair cost may exceed the price of a new computer.
Hi. I used the nVidia chipset drivers and installed the OS on a smaller, temporary hard drive. Everything was working fine. I decided to leave it on for some time, to see if anything happened. Well, sure enough, when I came back several hours later, the screen was dark, the computer was like in some kind of hibernation mode, and would not come back on. I did a hard shutdown with the power button, and when I tried to boot up, it wouldn't boot. Same original issue. So now I don't know what is wrong. I had both sides off the case, so I don't think it was a heat issue. Could it be from a previous heat issue that did something to the motherboard or processor itself?
The repair process uses the video driver shipped on the install media. But just in case, you can try adding another video card of a different brand and use it during the repair install. Note if you repair Windows you may lose some settings and files, make sure you backed up the files on the HDD to an external hard disk or DVD before continuing.
If you want to go to the harder path to find the cause of problem which is time-consuming and does not guarantee success, you can collect a boot log by choosing "Enable Boot Logging" in the F8 boot menu, then boot into your other HDD, find the bllot log file and post the log to Windows Live SkyDrive (so others can see it), then do your own research or ask a question like this in the system repair forum on this web site.
