So I had another one today. Different computer. It's about 5 years old, and has had Vista for a few years. Everything was fine... until a Windows Update occured at 3:00 AM.
The next day, there's no network. Reboot. Same problem. Check the back of the PC. Blinky lights on the network jack. Disconnect, reconnect the cable. Check network connections. Hmm, no network device. So I go to the device manager and everything related to network has a yellow exclamation mark. I check properties, and it said the device could not be started as "no device drivers could be found".
So I click Update Driver and have it search for drivers (since I certainly can't connect to the network to get a newer one). It comes back with "the most appropriate driver is already installed". Wait a minute, you said there WAS no device driver.
Next, I delete the device and reboot. It comes up with new hardware found. Spends about 5 minutes installing drivers. Then pops up with an error that the device could not be started as it was not responding.
OK, things aren't looking too good at this point. Figure Windows Update royally messed things up -OR- something on the PC has failed (like the network card). So it's time to run a System Restore. Select the point just before Windows Update occured; it goes through its routine and eventually reboots. Comes back with the same message that it's found a new device and is installing drivers. Um, if I restored to an earlier point that really should be back the way it was - with at minimum the non-existant driver installed. About 5 minutes later after a whole lot of disk thrashing an error pops up that system restore failed "due to an unknown error". Oh, great. Let me try to Google an "unknown error". Yeah, right.
Time to pick an OLDER restore point. I select one from a few days prior. It does its thing and reboots. The screen with the moving progress bar comes up. And stays up. Fifteen minutes later it's still there with no disk activity. I really should be seeing some disk activity. And what use is a progress bar that continues to progress when the system is dead. Nice design. So I reboot. Same thing again. Try again. This time the screen is completely corrupted and garbled. Uh oh.
Power off the system, back on, and the screen comes back up (whew), so it's now off to Safe Mode. Problem is it locks up too - doesn't even get very far, it dies during the first few driver loads. Try a couple more times, and it's remaining as dead as a door nail.
Has the motherboard failed? Hard drives? Something else? Start thinking of having to buy a new PC. Except that Windows 7 isn't going to be available for over a week. And this system can't be unavailable for a week.
As a last ditch effort I decide to try restoring a backup from my Windows Home Server (backs up once a day automatically, so there's about 18 hours missing). Use its boot restore CD and it actually loads OK. Detects the network card (hmm, looking good). Hard drives. Finds the backup server automatically on the network, identifies the PC, and actually starts the restore operation. "Estimated time remaining: 3 minutes". Wow, this should be good.
10 minutes later: "Estimated time remaining: 1 hour, 50 minutes".
2 hours later: "Estimated time remaining: 1 hour, 9 minutes".
1 hour later: Estimated time remaining: 1 hour, 20 minutes".
I've done this once before on a laptop, and it only took 20 minutes total. Is it actually working, or not? At this point I give up and let it run for the next 8 hours... come back and it said the restore completed successfully. Wow, really?
Reboot. Hey, Vista! Hey, network! Hey, everything's there and actually seems to be working.
I run a manual Windows Update to ensure that it completes successfully (it does) and so far so good.
