bootable vista disc

Old_Skool · 11 November 2008 at 10:33AM

Hi everyone,

I have two identical pcs pre-installed with vista home basic.

Unfortunately one has crashed badly to the point where the recovery will not work and I don't have installation discs.

Is it possible to make a bootable clone of the good pcs c drive to reload the crashed one?

I have heard it's possible for XP but have no idea about vista so any pointers would be appreciated.

Secondly, can anybody suggest any good software to help me.

Many thanks

Conor_3 · 11 November 2008 at 11:03AM

All you need is any Vista installation DVD from anywhere. All versions of Vista are on one DVD and what gets installed is determined by the CD key you enter. There's not a different DVD for different versions.

Cloning should work if the hardware is identical. You'll run into activation issues but you have a pukka key on the case anyway so at worst, it'll be a call to MS.

Find out the hard drive manufacturer in device manager, go to their website and download their hard drive installation software. Virtually all hard drive mftrs software does cloning and it does it very well.

mdbarber · 11 November 2008 at 2:41PM

shouldn't be a problem, think some versions of norton ghost can do this over a network cable if you can get hold of a copy. saves you removing the drives

totalsolutions · 11 November 2008 at 3:07PM

As Conor suggests really, all the same DVD, just an image of all Vista versions.
Can the working PC not create the disc set as it's normally stored on a different partition, running the "create recovery disc" options?

Old_Skool · 12 November 2008 at 12:47AM

Many thanks for all your replies so far.

I'm going to give the recovery disk set suggestion from total Solutions a go - the pc's are identical builds just with different keys on the case.

Let you know how it pans out.

Thanks again :T

CLLC · 12 November 2008 at 1:23AM

if you have not been able to save all your files try to run in safe mode and if that does work at least your documents will be safe

while booting keep tapping F8 until it boots in safe mode , than you can transfer your files

Hope this helps

Old_Skool · 15 November 2008 at 11:05AM

It's working again.

When the pc crashed I tried to reload using 'full factory recovery' feature as all my data was backed up.

This is what failed, after this all the pc would say is 'could not install windows please restart to install windows'- if you re-started you got the same message. This is why I was going to clone my other pc.

I could not run safe mode, last known good configuration etc and as I had no installation disc it seemed to be the only option.

I've looked on my other pc but cannot see how to create a recovery disk, the help files just point to the installation disk.

And then today........ decided to run the 'full factory recovery' feature one more time...... and it worked.... happy days.

Thankyou all for your suggestions and ideas.

I would still like to create a clone of the hard drive, just in case this happens again. If anybody could help with instructions it would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks :T

mdbarber · 15 November 2008 at 11:53AM

check what make of hdd is in them, sometimes the manufacturer provides free software to back up the drive such as seagates diskwizard available as a free download

Donnie · 15 November 2008 at 1:49PM

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml

Comparison of some options: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_cloning_software

Old_Skool · 21 November 2008 at 11:18AM

Many thanks Donnie,

Two excellent pages of information :T

bootable vista disc

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