Startup Repair -- how long is too long?

I have some computer repair background, but it was pre-vista. I've been in the web/software development field since. I was hoping to find some more information about this startup repair "feature", but it would seem even the 12 hours I have been waiting so far is not unusual. I built this computer a while back and my primary partition it should be scanning consist of two 74GB raptor hdds in raid0, so ~150GB total. So not a lot of space, and these things should be fairly quick.

I don't believe I have anything critical saved on this, but one tool I used regularly in my computer repair days is called "getdataback." It will perform a surface scan of the hdd and not only recover files from a drive previously assumed dead, but recover deleted files as well. I am going to hard reboot this thing..

Hello everyone!

Please, can someone help me? After my computer crashed a week ago I bought a new tower Dell Inspiron . On my old computer I had a EasyUSTodo back up and backed up the files just in case. The person who helps me sometimes with technical issues said that he cannot recover my files from the C ****. Although t back up was installed to my storage drive. Today I installed a free version of easyUS Todo and tried to clon the disk partition in attempt to know if I can recover my files. Cloning took about an hour and then display said it starting startup repair. It is going on around 2 hours now. I did shut down computer completely twice and then it asked what to do and here was my options:

1). Startup repair. - which is runnung

2). System restore- said that I don't  have earlier restore point

3). System image recovery - said that I don't have any system image yet

4.  Windows memory diagnostic

5). Command prompt - I didn't understand what should I do with it.

6).  Dell backup and recovery - did not find any issue on my PC.

what should I do? 

I assume you have moved beyond this by now, but if not, are you saying you had overwritten your new inspiron's drive with that of your old drive? Hopefully not..I would suggest purchasing a drive dock and simply pulling your storage drive and plugging it into the dock. That way, the drive will then show up within Computer as another drive letter and you can access your saved files from there (copy them over, don't use the old, failing drive as ongoing storage)

I gave up on Windows Startup Repair after over an hour.  I was hesitant, but powered down anyway.  Researching further I found that BCDEDIT didn't have proper values for DEVICE and OSDEVICE for my Windows 7 installation.  BCDEDIT showed "unknown" for both of these. 

I fixed this quickly by running Microsoft's BOOTREC /RebuildBcd in the Windows Recovery Environment.  See:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

I'm trying Startup Repair on a Windows Vista laptop that won't start up after having reportedly been shut down normally, after what sounded like a Trojan attack.  (Not sure what happened to it exactly, but my friend wasn't running antivirus software!)

Startup Repair says "Repairing disk errors. This might take over an hour to complete," but it's been running for about 9 hours now, and trying to Cancel it yields the message "The current repair operation cannot be cancelled" -- is it still actually doing anything? Would it be worth it to let Startup Repair run any longer?

Thanks

Doing Startup Repair today on Windows 7, because my Toshiba laptop would start up, but that's all.  Startup Repair started at 2PM for a 465 Gig drive.   At 8:25PM, I was on another PC, reading this forum and wondering if the Startup Repair was functioning at all...and all of a sudden the laptop on which I was running the Startup Repair rebooted and now everything seems to be fine.   So that was 6.5 hours.

please help i run an inspiron one 19 and tried using bios but wont work