When your computer won't start, it's bad enough that you can't get to your programs and data and that your productivity nosedives. What's even worse is that you can't get to your normal troubleshooting and diagnostics tools to see what the problem might be. Yes, there are startup troubleshooting techniques, but they can often be time-consuming, hit-or-miss affairs. If Windows is in its own partition, or if there's a solid backup ready, many people would prefer to simply reinstall Windows than spend an entire day tracking down a startup problem.

Such drastic solutions could be a thing of the past, thanks to Vista's new Startup Repair Tool (SRT), which is designed to fix many common startup problems automatically. When a startup failure occurs, Vista starts the SRT immediately. The program then analyzes the startup logs and performs a series of diagnostic tests to determine the cause of the startup failure. The SRT looks for a number of possible problems, but three are the most common:

• Incompatible or corrupted device drivers

• Missing or corrupted startup configuration files

• Corrupted disk metadata

If the SRT determines that the startup failure is being caused by one of these problems or some other common snag, the SRT attempts to fix the problem automatically. If it's successful, it lets you know what repairs it made and writes all changes to a log file so you can see exactly what transpired.

If the SRT can't fix the problem, it tries the system's Last Known Good Configuration. If that doesn't work, it writes all of its diagnostic data to a log and offers you support options to try to fix the problem yourself.