This week one of my Vista Ultimate 64 PCs failed to start. I saw a black screen with a blinking cursor at the top and Vista would not boot. Most people think this is the black screen of death and start reformatting their harddrive. Please don't, it's a fairly simple bug, but it looks 1000x worse than it is.

Vista is apparently waiting to install three new Automatic Windows Updates (or a printer driver, or any other kind of new device) but there is some kind of invisible prompt on this screen that does nobody any good. This bug affects the restart process and it's quite scary because it looks like your hard drive is toast! Note: my Vista OS is not on C:\, but rather on G:\ so the boot instructions on C:\ point to G:\ for the OS location. This might help the boys in Redmond (or Calcutta) troubleshoot the situation. For good measure you may want to disconnect your printer, web camera or other external devices outside of mouse, monitor, and keyboard, especially if this occurs after a device driver update. In my case it was just some operating system updates so I didn't need to.

Here is how I fixed it:

You will need to locate and insert your Vista CD and boot from it. In many cases you will need to set your PC's BIOS to Boot from CD. In my case I could tap F8 repeatedly during bootup and it would present a boot menu. There I would select the CD-ROM as the boot device. This may be specific to my PC's BIOS, so your best best is usually to go into the BIOS at startup and set the CD/DVD device containing your Vista DVD as #1 in your boot order.

Most people can access the BIOS when the PC first starts up by clicking either F2 or the DEL key when all the numbers appear on th screen. Then you look for a menu that says Boot Devices or Boot Order. Note that in must BIOSes you will need to use the arrow keys and ENTER key to navigate. Once done you make sure to Save Settings and Exit. Usually this is done with F10, but follow on-screen instruction as not all BIOSes are the same.

To fix my Vista boot problem I ran the Bootrec.exe tool. To load this, start the Vista CD (if you get a prompt to boot from the CD by clicking any key, please do so). Hit the Click space bar if you don't have the "any key." Sorry, bad geek humor. The Vista boot CD will take a while to start up,with first a progress bar, and then a colorful but empty screen will frustrate you for a while. Have patience, it will pass.... Next you will be asked to select a language, a time, a currency, a keyboard or an input method. Click next and then click on the link at the bottom of the sceen to "Repair your computer." The mouse pointer will be "busy" for a while, so wait. Select the operating system you want to repair when the mouse icon becomes a pointer and then click Next.

The first option is an auto repair option. If you do this and it says nothing was wrong, then you need to use the following instructions. Try it first and reboot to see if your OS is working (you may still have it set to boot from CD first, so avoid clicking on the "anykey to boot from CD" and it will eventually continue. If at this point you still get the flashing black cursor with nothing happening you will need to get back into the recovery console and follow these steps:

1) In the System Recovery Options dialog box, click Command Prompt.
2) When at the command prompt in the DOS console, type the following two commands followed by hitting the ENTER key:

bootrec.exe /FixBoot
bootrec.exe /FixMbr

These commands should return with a simple affirmative statement. When done, close the black DOS window and click the restart button or hit the reset button on your PC. Allow it to start Windows Vista from the hard drive. If all is well you will see "Installing Update x of y" and all will be well again.

Apparently in some rare cases the boot instructions get messed up during an install that requires a restart. This is something that needs to be fixed because this can be alarming to someone who has no other PC to search for solutions while this is happening.