Thread: corruption, decay, Vista Gateway laptop

  1. #1
    Kiss the monkey. CodeMonkey's Avatar
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    corruption, decay, Vista Gateway laptop

    Hello,
    I have a 2-3 year old Gateway laptop, with a default Windows Vista installation on it. I later put Ubuntu on, no problem.
    As soon as the second year of my having the computer, Vista started misbehaving as it relates to Windows Update. Finally, about a month ago, Vista was destroyed completely. I can still mount the partition and look at the files, but no recovery software out there can allow my Vista system to boot. It just crashes at bootup.
    So, I contacted Microsoft and mentioned that my recovery partition had gotten destroyed as well (nice, right?). Ok, well I deleted the recovery partition. I'll be honest.
    Anyway, they nicely agreed to send me a DVD so I could start Vista anew. That works for me.
    But now my DVD/CD drive died! Augh! Done! Useless!

    So, my question is, is there a way to set up my USB external hard drive to boot an image of the Vista installation DVD I expect to receive? Can this be done without removing the current contents from my USB hard drive?

    Thanks.

    PS: My BIOS will boot from USB hard drive.
    Last edited by CodeMonkey; 06-12-2009 at 09:38 PM. Reason: druken disregard for simple grammar
    "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything"
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  2. #2
    and the hat of sweating
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    I can't be 100% sure, but I think I copied a bootable image to a USB Flash drive a while ago and got it to boot up.
    "I am probably the laziest programmer on the planet, a fact with which anyone who has ever seen my code will agree." - esbo, 11/15/2008

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  3. #3
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    unetbootin supports booting from iso's on a harddrive. I'm not sure if it's Linux-specific, though.

    Do you have an external DVD drive?

  4. #4
    Kiss the monkey. CodeMonkey's Avatar
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    No, Cyberfish, I do not. Although, that is worth looking for among friends. There's some stuff on google about using a flash drive. Perhaps I can transfer the information for using my USB hard drive. The trick will be making a bootable drive without formatting the thing. All of my data that I wish to save from Vista is on the drive I will be using to install Vista!
    "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything"
    -Mark Twain

  5. #5
    Woof, woof! zacs7's Avatar
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    Yes you can. :-)

    Although I've never done it with Vista. I used a Win98 boot disk (which was on the USB with XP) to start the XP installation off a USB drive.

    Or you could install vista on the external drive, and then use Linux to "copy" it over. Not sure how well that'd work though.

  6. #6
    Kiss the monkey. CodeMonkey's Avatar
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    I realized that I had some money left on an Amazon girft card, so I bought myself an 8 gig flash drive. When it and my DVD arrive, I should be in the clear.
    "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything"
    -Mark Twain

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