Hey guys. I'm new to Linux and I was running Windows Vista before. I mounted my Windows hard drive into Ubuntu and now whenever I try to long onto Windows I get a black screen with the mouse where the log-in page should be. I used all the commands that was I had read about like "sudo mount" and stuff and I can see my Windows files in Ubuntu but no log-on page for Windows. Can anyone offer any help please?

Can you boot into Windows in Safe Mode?

Hmmm...

When you mounted your Windows partition in Ubuntu, did you change any files on it? This sounds like it could be the result of some corrupted system file somewhere.

Safe mode has the same result and system repair tools all says everything is ok. I did copy .mp3 files into a separate Ubuntu folder. Would that have messed it up?

Unless the destination folder was also on your Windows partition, I don't think anything could get screwed up this way.

If you have a Vista installation disc around, you might be able to automatically repair the system using that. I think there's an option for that somewhere.

I think I have the Windows disk lying around somewhere but I was really trying to avoid doing something like that if I could. Is there any other way I might be able to get my log-on page back without having to go through the whole repair or restore process?

Access Safe Mode by pressing F8 while the computer boots. Once in Safe Mode, you should probably try running a disk check on the C:\ volume with Windows' own tools.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/w...r-in-safe-mode
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/w...isk-for-errors

I've done a disk check with the chkdsk command and it said that there were no errors with the computer.

If windows says "were no errors with the computer" then everything must be OK

But are you saying windows doesn't boot? Or that it boots, but there is no login sceen? There's a difference.

Does windows tell you anything interesting when it is booting? An error message or something?

Does it "sound right" when booting windows? Usually there's a lot of disk activity, and you can hear that, or see your HDD licht flashing.

Which version of linux are you running?

I'm running Ubuntu version 2.6.31-22-generic and everything seems to be working on start up. The disk sounds like a lot is going on and there aren't any error messages. It does boot but there is no log in screen. All I see is the loading bar and then when the log in screen should appear, nothing is there except the mouse.

OK, it's "Ubuntu". They normally have numbers like 9.10 or 10.04, or names like "Karmic", "Lucid". The version is your kernel version.

Sounds like windows is booting then. If it wasn't booting, maybe I could have helped you make it boot.
Perhaps windows is broken and as my last version of win was Win98, I can't help you further.
Maybe someone else can.
Good luck.

Did you enable the "Automatically Fix Errors" checkbox?

If you did and it still refuses to boot, it looks like a repair installation might be your easiest bet. As always, back up before you do - there's nothing worse than losing files unnecessarily.

When you talk about that check box do you mean to use the command "chkdsk -r" to do that through command line or is that not the command to perform that?

Ah, yes, I'm not sure, to be honest.

I've had something similar happen to me with NTFS disks being written to from Linux (this was with OpenSuse 11.0) - I found my disks weren't being read properly in Vista after writing a lot of data to them from Linux. So, I booted into Safe Mode, which gave me a barebones graphical interface, from which I could open "Computer" in Vista, then right click on the affected drive (in your case, this would be the C:\ drive, I imagine), and go to Properties. In Properties, there's an option under the Tools tab called Error-checking, with a Check Now button (see attached image). This windows has a checkbox called "Automatically fix file system errors": that's the box I was referring to.

By the way, some of the wording may be different in the dialogues, I'm doing this from Windows 7 at work.

This method fixed my disks, which were not OS disks.

Attached Thumbnails

 

I would do that except I can't get to the log in page because the screen just goes black and I can only see the mouse. I'm getting stuck before the log in page and none of the safe modes or regular modes work.