Fix: Vista crcdisk.sys reboot loop.
I’ve spent the last two days dealing with a laptop, which, after replacing it’s ailing hard drive, would enter into a reboot loop once I’d reinstalled and updated Vista Basic (Dell OEM). The system would show the loading bar for less than a second, flash blue-screen, and then reset.
Running through startup in safe mode has the system get as far as crcdisk.sys, but, if you got here, you probably already know.
As no-one seemed to have found an answer to this problem, I wanted to post how I got around this.
The short of it is: Don’t install the optional Windows “Recommended” updates.
After reinstalling a first time, I got a chunk of the important updates installed and rebooted several times in a row to check stability. Attempting to install the recommended updates as a lot failed and, once again, I got the loop had to reinstall. On the third install, I didn’t install any of the optional updates and it seemed I got a lot more updates (I don’t remember seeing Service Pack 2 on the first time round.).
Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that what was happening was I was being allowed to install an optional update before it’s pre-requisite main update had installed (Linux people may know this as a dependency problem.) so installing them after all the main updates might not present the main problem but, I’m not risking having to install Windows again to find out.
In conclusion: Recommended Updates are optional and can break your computer. They may also be presented before it’s safe to install them.
