Restoring Vista on home machine

[SimpleSi]

Well -I've got someones personal Vista laptop and its borked - the downloadable Vista repair cd says it can;t find any information to recover the OS.

 

An of course, it didn't come with a recovery DVD.

 

Is there anyway to get Vista back on it with buying the OS again?

 

regards

 

Simon

[t_h]

If it's a popular brand in most cases you can contact the manufacturer and get replacement recovery discs for around £40. Cheaper than buying the OS again. You could always try and borrow an OEM Vista disc and use the key you've got, but then obviously you'd have to find the drivers yourself.

 

Aside from that there isn't much you can do if it is borked.

[SimpleSi]

You could always try and borrow an OEM Vista disc

 

I've never see a Vista Machine come with one

 

regards

 

Simon

[jedmondson]

do you have msndn or technet subscription ? that might work?

[FN-GM]

do you have msndn or technet subscription ? that might work?

 

No it will only work with VLK's

 

What version are you after. As long as you have a key on your OEM sticker any CD should do. I believe you could even torrent a media DVD then use your OEM key.

[Guest richard_s]

No it will only work with VLK's

 

What version are you after. As long as you have a key on your OEM sticker any CD should do. I believe you could even torrent a media DVD then use your OEM key.

 

You can use an OEM disc with the COA that is on the underside of the laptop. The other thing I would do is check on the manufacturers website to see if there is a recovery partition on the HDD. Most modern laptops have this if it does then they should have instructions on how to access this and start the restore process.

[t_h]

I don't know if this is still that case, but if you have any Dell machines the recovery disc that comes with them (even though it is branded) is actually a vanilla OEM disc.

 

I've only ever done this with XP a few years ago so I could be miles off, but worth a shot if you know anyone who has bought a Dell recently.

[Ignatius]

... a recovery partition on the HDD. Most modern laptops have this if it does then they should have instructions on how to access this and start the restore process.

That's fine as long as it's possible to boot as far as the restore utility. If the HD is borked, then the recovery partition isn't available.

 

A friend has XP Media Centre Edition and, whilst there is a recovery partition, the manual which came with the laptop gave instructions about creating a recovery CD ASAP - just in case the HD requires replacement. I know that this isn't necessarily going to help the OP, but it's worth bearing in mind for others who buy a system which has a recovery partition but no recovery CD.

 

I think it's preposterous for a manufacturer to charge £40 for a recovery CD if there is no way of creating it from the original installation. Hard drives are far more resilient now, but they still die.

[SimpleSi]

I nearly made it

 

I got hold of a Dell OEM disc and it installed fine - plugged in a USB WiFi dongle and download all the drivers and then went to activate it - failed

 

The OEM disc is Vista basic and the machine came with Vista Premium - I'll see if anyone's got an OEM Vista Premium and try again!

 

regards

 

Simon

[SimpleSi]

Well - a bit of luck finally - the teacher mentioned that her other daughter had also had a laptop and it was bought at the same time - it is the same make machine

 

THought great- just image it to portable hard drive and restore on broken - that didn't work - just ended up with blank desktop (nothing - no icons start bar or anything - all I could do was use task manager to run explorer - tried creating another user - that did the same thing )

 

But luckily, I could create a backup dvd using the tech guys routine on the other machine and used that to create a brand new fresh vista install on the broken machine

 

In a few days, it might have finished doing updates and I can take it home

 

regards

 

Simon

Moral of story - always run the create a dvd restore disk on a new machine!