Loran

You could be right about the SP1 thing. Not sure though... I got the system with the laptop over a year ago. So I guess there have been some upgrades. As for safe mode I haven't been able to login in any mode.

Hmmm... There was an error after the part where you have to choose which system you have purchased. How do you locate the file on the HD? SO far most of my copying attempts with various files haven't been succeeding for some reason.

I have an Acer Aspire 9302 AWMi. AMD Turion 64 2.2GHz, 80 GB HDD (split into two internal drives C: and D:), 1GB DDR2 and it runs Vista Home Premium. It's been repaired once and had the motherboard fixed. Anyway a while ago it suddenly refused to boot. In the beginning I could access the advanced boot options with F8 but now I can't anymore. So far throughout the duration of the problem I have been getting a "winload.exe is missing or corrupt" on a black screen which has options to continue or exit. If you click continue it goes to another page where you can either start Vista or some memory scanning app. If you choose to start vista it goes blank for a moment and then returns to the earlier screen with the "winload.exe" error. I tried the BootAgent and the recovery CD but neither of them has worked. They both freeze when they are in the middle of copying the files. I also tried the alt F10 option which also allows you to try recovery but it also froze. I have recently gotten hold of a Vista Install CD. I tried the repair function but so far the automatic one hasn't worked. I then tried to manually copy winload.exe with "copy c:/windows/system32/boot/winload.exe c:/windows/system32" I think it worked since that error has disappeared. It has now been replaced with an identical error but now with a file called ntkrnlpa.exe I tried to copy it in the same way as I did with winload.exe but it didn't work. I then tried to just go back to a restore point using the Install CD. It claimed that I didn't have any restore points. I tried doing the "bootrec/fixboot" command which didn't produce any real results. Supposedly it didn't understand what I was asking of it. It only understood "bootrec.exe" command. I would then list some options including "/FixBoot" but when I try it still doesn't accept the command. It's getting quite frustrating and I'm not really a wiz with computers. Anyone know what could be wrong or what I should try next?