vinofino

I am sure it’s the recovery disks not communicating with whatever is preinstalled by the manufacturer that is the problem but I don’t know what a universal vista is I searched around. From what I understand a retail Vista will not work with my license number because mine was issued to the manufacturer and will not authenticate to a retail one.

Yes , I tried the Vista recovery program and repair failed I did all the hard drive tests you describe before and based on the results and talking to other people concluded the HDD was bad so I replaced with same manufacturer and model although it has more storage capacity. The OEM ‘tattoo’ thing is interesting as I was suspecting something like this. I noticed in my research that a similar message to the one in my first post occurs for IT people who are trying to deploy Windows 7 on a network except the component named is [Microsoft-Windows-Shell Set Up].

Hard drive MBR went and have replaced drive. Obtained recovery discs from the manufacturer and cannot complete install getting the message “Windows could not parse or process the unattend answer file for pass [specialize]. The settings specified in the answer file cannot be applied. The error was detected while processing settings for component [Microsoft-Windows-Deployment]" Manufacturer sent second set of disks suggesting first defective. Install attempt produced same results. What is solution? Manufacturer suggesting hardware problem (unit out of warranty)