Whenever I turn on my relatively new Windows Vista Ultimate Edition computer a DOS looking screen appears before the Windows splash screen asking which operating system I would like to start. This is much like a dual-boot computer with multiple operating systems installed. However, the only operating system installed on the computer is Windows Vista. When I select the Windows Vista option in the boot menu another menu appears giving me the option to boot the computer into Safe Mode, Normal Mode, or Step-by-Step Confirmation. I always select Normal mode but I still cannot boot into Windows, as most of the time the monitor indicator light changes from active to inactive and the screen displays “No Signal”. I have detached the monitor cables from the computer to blow away any dust but that has not helped fix the problem. Can you help?

This is certainly strange behaviour which your computer is exhibiting since the boot manager (the first menu asking which operating system you would like to start) should not appear on a computer with only one operating system installed. There also appears to be something wrong with Windows itself since the monitor displays “No Signal” once you attempt to boot Windows into Normal mode. The menu that appears (with Normal, Safe Mode, etc.) after you select the operating system is an error recovery menu which automatically appears should the computer fail to correctly start on a previous attempt, indicating that there is a problem with the operating system requiring you to boot the computer into Safe Mode for recovery. I imagine that this menu appears because the computer is failing to successfully boot because the monitor loses signal and then you (most likely) turn off or restart the computer. This means that if Windows Vista is actually loading, but nothing is being displayed on the monitor for one reason or another, the boot process is being interrupted when you shutdown or restart the computer in response to the monitor problem. To be honest, there is no other way around this issue because nothing is being displayed on the monitor (so you can’t actually use the computer in that state!) but at least this could explain why the error recovery menu is appearing.

Nevertheless, this does not bring us any closer to figuring out why Windows is not booting correctly and displaying on the monitor. As a first test, try booting the computer into Safe Mode. This is a special diagnostic mode of Windows which only loads the bare essentials to get Windows up and running, meaning that no unnecessary drivers or processes are loaded on startup. This is particularly useful if the computer is experiencing problems, as it narrows down the possible causes of the issue. To boot into Safe Mode, when the recovery menu appears, select the Safe Mode option and press the ENTER key. If Windows successfully boots then this indicates that something on the computer is causing the problem. In this situation, I suspect that the most likely culprit would be the display or graphics driver. Therefore, I would suggest that you download the latest drivers from the graphics card manufacturer’s website and then install these drivers onto the computer through Safe Mode. Hopefully these updated drivers should resolve the problem and when you next boot into Normal mode it will come-up correctly.

However, if the problem continues we could spend quite a bit more time attempting to debug this problem, but since your computer is relatively new I would suggest the best option is complete a clean reinstallation of Windows. However, before doing so you should ensure that any data on your computer that you wish to keep has been backed-up, since the reinstallation of Windows will result in all data on your computer being lost. My recommended method for backing-up data is using a USB drive, as that is the easiest and quickest method to backup large amounts of data. Once you have backed-up all the data you wish to keep, and verified that you definitely have all the required data, disconnect the USB drive from the computer and then store in a safe place (as you will need the drive later so that the data can be restored onto your computer with a fresh installation of Windows Vista).

Now that the backup has completed we are ready to commence reinstalling Windows Vista. Insert the Windows Vista disc into the drive on the computer and then restart the machine. Alternatively, if you have a brand name computer you should check the computer manual in case there is a different procedure you need to follow (such as using a special recovery disc or recovery partition on the hard drive). Assuming that you are reinstalling Windows the standard way, using the Windows disc, the computer should automatically detect the disc in the drive on restart and proceed to boot off that disc. Should this not occur, then you may need to press a particular key during the boot-up process of your computer to boot from a CD/DVD (on some brands of computers you need to tap the F12 key to produce a boot menu, but this may differ depending on the brand of machine so you should consult the manual which came with your computer). Once the computer has booted from the Windows Vista media, follow through the installation wizard to install Windows Vista. When you are prompted for the install location, make sure that you format the drive in the computer so that you remove the existing installation of Windows Vista before installing a new copy. Once the installation has completed and you have a working computer, reconnect the backup USB drive to the computer and restore your data back onto the freshly installed copy of Windows Vista.

In the event that you were able to resolve the problem with Windows Vista not booting correctly, this should have also fixed the problem of the recovery menu appearing, since once you are able to successfully boot the operating system, the recovery menu should no longer appear (as that only appears when it detects an unsuccessful previous attempt at starting Windows). However, the Windows boot menu (asking which operating system you would like to start) is probably still coming up so we need to somehow stop this menu from appearing on startup. This is a tricker process due to the way that Windows Vista stores its operating system and startup information, known as the Boot Configuration Data (BCD). This is quite different to Windows XP, making the process more difficult and troublesome to fix. There are several BCD editing utilities available on the internet which can assist with the process of removing the menu (and any extraneous entries from the menu) but I have never used such utilities and cannot provide a recommendation as to their effectiveness. Additionally, there is a very real risk that you could accidentally misconfigure something, causing your installation of Windows Vista to not boot at all. Therefore, if you do wish to try changing the boot configuration of the computer I strongly recommend that you have a complete backup of the computer beforehand, just in case things go wrong and you need to do a reinstallation of Windows (which would result in all data on your computer being lost during the reinstallation process).

Of course, if you do not wish to brave changing the boot menu you can just leave that and manually select the operating system each time the computer boots (or alternatively, if the operating system which you are using is the default option on the boot menu then it should time out and load that option automatically after 30 seconds).

We will now deal with the final possible scenario, that you cannot even boot Windows Vista into Safe Mode. This indicates that the Windows Vista installation on the computer is completely corrupt which is preventing you from booting into the operating system at all. In this case you have a few options. First, if there is no data on the computer that you need to keep (i.e. because the computer is new you have not loaded or created any personal data on the machine), and you are happy to lose anything which is stored on the computer, then you can just do a clean reinstallation of Windows Vista following the steps previously outlined. The other situation is that there is data on the computer which you need to backup and keep. Of course, because you cannot boot Windows and login to the operating system this creates a major problem – you cannot access the data that you wish to backup. In this situation your best option is to take the computer to a computer technician to backup the data and reinstall Windows, or contact your computer vendor should it still be under warranty. It is likely that the computer technician can remove the hard drive from your computer then connect to another computer so that the data on the drive can be retrieved directly. This is dependent on the data on the drive not being corrupt, or the drive itself not being faulty, but hopefully the data would be recoverable. Alternatively, as the computer technician would be looking at the computer they may have a different suggestion to resolve the problem which doesn’t require the backup and recovery of data.