When you get a 'Blue Screen of Death' (BSOD) error and your PC WON'T boot, Microsoft has NO CLUE what causes it other than remove your hd cable and re-seat it (Come on man, is THAT the best they can come up with for a solution? AND it's THEIR operating system?) It's CRUCIAL that you HAVE the installation cd when you buy anew PC, SO you can FIX these kind of problems when they happen (and they WILL happen), otherwise you'll find yourself right back here looking for solutions rather than HAVING the solutions IN your installation CD's.

This is EXACTLY WHY it's best to have a PC custom built rather than buying one off the shelf at a store. After about an hour my disk was apparently fixed and Windows now boots up as it used to. Nonetheless, I then recall typing in caps, 'CHKDSK /R' (You can type 'HELP CHKDSK' to see all the options). I have also read that it may require you to enter your password. This initiated a command console screen and after I selected '1' for my location of the Windows Operating System I was trying to fix a prompt was given. Eventually (took a few minutes) I was presented with an option to hit 'R' to enter a recovery/repair mode. When I hit a key (I had about 5 seconds to hit a key) the PC began to boot up using the CD.

The PC then started, gave me a 'Press any key to boot from CD' command.

I inserted my XP CD and selected the 'boot from CD' option. At power on I hit F12 (may be different on your PC - computer tells you at boot up) to enter the Boot Screen. I did this on XP but would think it Vista is the same. I'm not sure but I would expect your PC or Vista came with a Vista CD. I am running window vista ultima, so how i perform the chkdsk, since window wouldn't boot. My dell laptop just got this error message tonight, i run the diagnosis test and an error message pointed to the Harddrive, it said DST short test something like that.

Hard drive dst short test