Hi,

I have a laptop with Vista home basic which wont boot, not even in safe mode (it just restarts endlessly after the loading screen)

I'm trying to make a backup of the files before I do anything further. I've put the drive in a PC with XP home, started in safe mode, but when I open the properties of the Documents and Settings folder, there is no security tab for me to take ownership of it.

A security tab appears on the other folders on that drive, so why not this one?

Cheers

Ok, I found the solution!

I just had to open the property page for the HDD its self. This gave me a security tab and allowed me to take ownership of the whole disk and files

Hope this helps someone else looking for the same.

I am really glad we were able to fix your problem! lol

Hope this helps someone else looking for the same.

It sure wouldn't if you had not posted your solution. Thanks for the followup!

Haha, Actually it seems I spoke too soon

It's just finished changing the permissions but now when I try to open that Documents and Settings folder, it says "E:\Documents and Settings refers to a location that is unavailable. It could be on a hard drive on this computer, or on a network......."

The drive is from a laptop, so I don't know where it could be.

My Computer reports the disk size as 103Gb but the labels says 120Gb. It is a Packard Bell, so I'm guessing there's a recovery partition that has disappeared. Still, Documents and settings shouldn't point there right?

I had run chkdsk /r. Could this be why? (i.e. some corrupted sectors are now being bypassed)

chkdsk /r would not have broken it, but rather attempted to fix it.

Is E: drive right?

Rather than opening the folder, try exploring it.

Yeah, it is E:. I've fitted it to a PC with several drives.

I'm just scanning with 1st NTFS recovery, which seems to show that there was an additional recovery sector as I suspected.

I'll let you know if that program can fix it for me.

Sounds like a plan. Please keep us posted. We all may learn something new yet.

Well I ran the wizard, and it said it "Fixed" it for me. Now instead of seeing the system partition in explorer, I see just the recovery one!

Restoring the backup I made beforehand seems to do nothing. I guess it is rather broke

Looks like I'll just repartition it as one large one, then reinstall vista.

Sorry - out side of a repair install, I see no other options.

Yep, reinstalled Vista. All fine now.