my computer wont start?

[michiganman1993]

well ill start off by saying idk if this post goes here, but here it it

ok so today i installed a program called cain and abel to do one of the realistic missions. so i installed it and after it was done it said it needed to run off of another program i didnt have's update
so i downloaded the update
in the middle of hat download, the progress bar stopped, and the close button went grey so i could not click it. panicked, and thinking it was installing spyware, i did a hard shut down (i know, horrible idea). when i went to turn it back on, it stayed black for a minute, and then it came up with an error message about it not being able to find a file that had something to do with a system file....any ideas?

[mischief]

usually giving an exact error message is helpful. also, ##windows on irc.freenode.net might be able to help you.

[insomaniacal]

We need more information. Did Windows start to boot up, then fail? If so, you probably corrupted some system files and you best bet is either to try to find out what file(s) and either replacing them, or doing a system restore.

If Windows wasn't able to start booting, you could have messed up the MBR, or else messed up some specific boot files. If this is the case, you can try Super Grub Disk (Google It), to try to fix the MBR.

But, as mischief said, more specific error codes and more specific information (even if it may seem unimportant at first) would be helpful.

[acantho]

I had a similar problem to this a while back and this may help.

I had just installed a new HDD and a clean install of windows vista, so as you can imagine I had loads of updates to load. I had lloaded most of them and after one update shut down so that it could install the updates, as it finishes this on the next start up I left it till next morning - started it up but the power went down as it was finishng the install - I was then stuck in a start up -> reboot loop nothing I could do other than an other clean reinstall ! But befoe I did that I used a live CD of linux to get in and copy over data files to an external drive - I had lost them once due to a HDD failure and had had a time of it getting them back - so wasn't about to loose them again.

In short - live cd - copy any / all of your data files, e.g. word, excel etc basically your work. do a clean reinstall of windows and then reinstall all of your programes. Unless somebody has a better answer.

[OnlyHuman]

If it's the Couldn't Find NTLRD.DLL error, then you're pretty much screwed until you re-install your OS. If that's the case, acantho's suggestion might be your only option. Sorry for the edit, I just realized that acantho and I said pretty much the same thing.