Windows Vista Recovery Disk and Repair Disc Download

2,732 thoughts on “Windows Vista Recovery Disk and Repair Disc Download”

1. hii I have a problem in dual booting VISTA and XP with VISTA installed first.
   ie…I have VISTA already in my HP laptop,when I tried to dual boot XP in it ( when I insert XP CD) windows XP setup screen is showing that “the setup could not detect any hard drive in the system”

   thank you

2. Mine says it is mising this file(both the x64 and x86) and i have downloaded it 3 times already. Iam ready to smash the computer into pieces with a hammer and upload the video to youtube.
   Stay tuned at youtube i am going to kill a HP laptop with a hammer it is going to be awesome!!!
   —
   Windows cannot open the required file D:\Sources\Install.wim. Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation. Error code: 0x8007000D

3. well, im just wondering if i’m using the 32bit versions of windows, which one i have to download whether it is the x64 or the x86 one? thanks 😉

4. Hi,

   Hope someone can help me on this as I have been struggling for a while. Couple days ago my laptop froze, did a force reboot, and upon the restart had the dreaded message: “A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart”. I didn´t have a repair disk, or any Vista Ultimate Install CDs. I finally found this great site and downloaded the torrent, burned the CD, the first time I did, everything started well, it showed the Microsoft progress bar, and then nothing. First time I burnt the image, ws with powerISO, then tried with IMgBurn, and at the most I get to a black screen with the mouse arrow that I can move around but the screen is totally black. Has anyone encountered such a problem before? Is there a solution? It would be great if could just try to fix it myself instead of going somewhere. Thanks for all your help.

5. It worked !!! thanks you so much ! I was crying my eyes out this morning because the damn window vista won’t load up and the stupid recovery dvd didn’t do anything ! argh ! thanks again.

6. I think it should be a law that HP has to sent the Vista disks and not their bloated ‘recovery disks.’ I am willing to pay for the WAU disks, but MS is no longer selling them.

   There is no way to get WAU disks anymore?

7. Hi.
   I’ve downloaded the ISO from the torrent listed, but there is no “x:\boot\bootsect.exe” on the CD…
   Where is it?
   I was trying to follow the instructions on http://neosmart.net:8070/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+from+the+DVD

8. Once you boot into the WinPE environment, the contents of the CD appear differently.

   You need to replace X: with the letter that the WinPE environment says is your CD drive’s letter.

9. Well, never mind. I’ve used this: http://www.partedmagic.com
   It’s a live CD, just booted from it, run TestDisk, Analize and Write. Bang!

   Now my vista is working again, just to backup and get rid of it. XP, come back!

10. tttttttttt

11. Just wondering, will this void a warranty because HP said if i tried to use any toher disk apart from there own it would.

12. Hello! Please help Computer Guru or Mahmoud Al-Qudsi or anyone who can help.
    I have burned to iso w/ imgburn I’ve loaded it in Vaio Laptop. It boots but sits at the Black Screen with the loading bar showing green , (as if loading) . However, it has been doing this for a good 20 or more minutes. I also had a difficulty with locating the install.wim File.

13. Looking for The Vista Home premium edition w/out all the other software pre-installed. Please post a link.

    THanks

14. Vista recovery disk would have been a great help to me here in iraq. Too bad that it won’t doenload, will have to buy crappy vista via mail to recover my laptop.

15. Gav, no software you use can void your warranty. The warranty can only be voided by physically opening-up your laptop and messing around with the hardware (and even then some states will maintain that HP must still provide warranty support).

16. Hello! Please help Computer Guru or Mahmoud Al-Qudsi or anyone who can help. I have burned to iso w/ imgburn I’ve loaded it in Vaio Laptop. It boots but sits at the Black Screen with the loading bar showing green , (as if loading) . However, it has been doing this now for 16 hours. I also had a difficulty with locating the install.wim File (in the x32 version). I tried to change X: to D: (my cd in pe), however, it just placed the D: under the X: prompt.

    Please help~

17. So with this recovery disk would I be able to actually boot up the recovery console directly from the disk and then reformat the drive to destroy the data/partions?

18. So with this disk can I actually boot from it to reformat my drive and wipe out all data/partitions?

19. is this file work with vista business x86 also

20. hi does the recovery work with vista premium 32bit version? if so which download do i use many thanks for your hep in advanced

21. Hey all. I’ve used the disc and it works… except I can’t FULLY restore my computer, which is what I want. I have no Vista DVD, only this new restore CD. It tells me that I don’t have a restore point to fully restore my computer.

    Is there a way around this? Please help.

22. The WIAK would be great, if Mico$oft didn’t insist on using that stupid validation tool on their site – makes it useless to me, since my work PC is linux-based. Yes, it matters, since my work is PC support, and part of support often means having to format and reload machines for people who forget or lose their CD’s – or buy from OEMs who use recovery partitions instead of including actual CD’s – usually not a big deal, unless the problem is a failed hard drive!

23. You can create this cd from recovery partition(for acer laptop pqservice partition).
    I have created this cd from there

24. lifesaver, I have been trying to boot Vista in a VM and can’t get past the ‘your hardware may have changed’ error that needed a repair or install cd to correct.

    no cd’s came with my Compaq presario and the restore partition was removed to install Linux.

    Now I hope to run games and shareaza that wasn’t compatible that well with Wine.

25. Once downloaded and burned to a CD which program do i open the CD with?

26. Once burned to a disc what program do i open the file with?

    Thanks

27. Computer Guru,

    I have virtually no idea how to fix a computer. My Vista has been giving me several problems for the past few days. It’s from Gateway/DELL.

    Whenever I’ve had problems before, I used a program called HijackThis to scan my computer for viruses, spyware and such, and sent the log it creates to a friend who knows a lot more about what to do. He’s been able to help me fix every problem I’ve had so far, but he doesn’t know what’s wrong with this. He fears that I could possibly have been hacked.

    I don’t want to go through all the trouble of having my computer checked out, I can’t afford it. But I do want to confront this problem, whatever it is. My computer will do very strange things when it starts up. It runs a disc check whenever I boot it about 80% of the time, and sometimes goes right into a blue screen, in which I am forced to turn it off. When it does run as it normally should, there is incredible lag, and some programs won’t work. It’s always something different every time. One time, my keyboard stopped working. It’s a miracle I could even get as far as I had to in order to type this. When I try to run things like Windows Firewall, a message comes up saying that my computer can’t access Security Logs, and it will refuse to run the program.

    Most of the time I can only get the computer to run at all in Safe Mode. This obviously irritates me because Safe Mode has many limits, when I have to do many activities on my computer that involve the sound working and for me to save WordPad files.

    I want to make sure this disc is the right program I need. Will it help me?

28. My friend doesnt have working cd-rom in his laptop so can the image been started from memory stick?

29. Yes. Download a copy of EasyBCD and use its WinPE-booting feature to create an entry linking to the .WIM file in the CD image (extract the CD image to disk with WinRAR or equivalent). Only catch is that you need to be able to boot into Windows to do this, so make sure you do this step before you end up needing to boot from the CD to recover your PC!

30. Hey Computer Guru or anyone out there, i forgot my password and iam trying to reboot the computer with the Recovery Cd. When i try to install it it says no install file located. Can someone please help me

31. The file is called “D:\Sources\Install.wim” says does not exist

32. “”Scott
    Feb. 13th, 2008 at 3:33 am

    Ben, did you switch disks to your own Vista Recovery disk after booting with this one? You can only recover the boot files from this disk. If you want recover the whole system, you have you switch to your own Vista Recovery disk — that has your product number verification. If you don’t have the DVD, you can start from F8 or F11 when booting up & it should open your Recovery partition and give you a menu. That will restore your system if you can get to it.””

    I THINK YOU HAVE DONE IT!!!

33. Can anyone help me out?
    I have a HP laptop preloaded with vista premium. after installing Win XP SP2 , I can no longer open Vista OS. My D: drive is partioned and is named Recovery. But I dont know how to restore Vista. Is it Also possible to have multiple OS like Win XP and Vista Premium. Kindly help

34. That worked fine for me. Thanks you very much. Looking forward to seeing further useful articles from you.

35. I need help.I bought a new Pc(Acer E380). I deleted my Windows Vista from my new PC, because i thought that I have a dvd with windows vista, but the cd was empty. Can you help me? Where I can get the win vista now? Sory, my English is not so good. Thx

36. Dear Marek, you’d have to go to the shop and buy one.

37. 2 Quick Questions: I had a recent episode of my explorer.exe restarting over and over again. I have the Vista DVD (bootable) that lets you install all version of Vista.

    1. Is this bootable version .iso (from neosmart) offer anything more than my bootable Vista DVD has? As far as recovery tools and utils…

    2. On my Vista DVD it has the option of Repairing the system. I have NOT tried this yet because Im wondering if it will set my Vista OS back to all its DEFAULT settings…then me having to go an recreate shortcuts for all my software, redo all my tweaks etc…or does it simply rewrite the important files and leaves the configuration alone.

    any info or advise appreciated.

    Steph
    Poland

38. Hi,

    I am using a Lenovo X61 and i would like to share with you how i fixed my MBR.

    1) I was initially running both Vista and Ubuntu linux. I deleted my Linux partition on purpose and i forgot to take note that my boot loader was ‘Grub’ which depended on my Linux partition to boot up. Hence, as a result of me removing my linux partition, my grub boot loader was broken !!

    2) My laptop does NOT come with a CD ROM drive and hence i could not boot up with a recovery disk. Thus the option of using a boot CD was not possible. It was 12 midnight and all i had was my trusty Knoppix Linux on my USB thumb drive.

    3) I booted up in Knoppix and tried various MBR related commands (e.g. testdisk & ms-sys) which supposedly removed the GRUB. Though GRUB was removed, the windows boot loader did not know where to find the partition in which Windows was located so i was back to square one.

    4) I realised that my notebook had a “OS-Restore” option in a recovery partition. I tried booting up this partition by pressing the ‘ThinkVintage’ button but i still got the same Windows boot loader error. I realised i was very close to solving this. Being a linux administrator, i had to solve this damn problem, i told myself !!! So i started thinking the Linux way.

    5) I plugged in my Knoppix thumb drive again and booted up Knoppix. I attempted to reinstall grub ! Yes, you read it right, i was attempting to reinstall GRUB ! I ran the command ‘grub-install’ but it failed as the “/boot” partition was not available. I used “cfdisk” to create a 128MB dummy partition and formatted it to ext3 using ‘mkfs’. I managed to install grub using ‘grub-install’.

    6) I rebooted the system and was sent straight into the grub command line ! Holy shit, i was expecting a nice menu but what i got was plain grub 🙁 Nevermind, i realised that i could tell grub to boot up the recovery partition by typing the following commands:-

    > root (hd0,0)
    > chainloader +1
    > boot

    I rebooted the damn machine and hurray, i managed to boot up into Lenovo recovery ! You must be wondering why i did not attempt to boot up from my Windows partition directly (aka [hd0,1]) ? Well, i tried it too but it did not work for reasons i realised later but shall not describe it here…

    7) Well, its not over yet. Lenovo did not allow me to boot up into Vista recovery. It only gave me factory restore options that would have overwritten my Windows settings and additional applications i had installed. No way, i was going to do that. All i needed was to get into command prompt but there was no such option for me to do so. I noted that there was a ‘Open-browser’ option that was meant to allow the user to be allowed access to Lenovo’s website. I clicked on it (it was a opera browser) and and the first thing that glared into my eyes was the URL bar. I typed “c:\windows\system32” and the file listing of the directory appeared right before my eyes !!! I scrolled down to the file – “cmd.exe” and clicked on it. It prompted me with the download dialog box but i opted to run it straight away.

    8) Phew, the black command prompt window appeared. I typed the following commands”-

    > bootrec /fixmbr
    > bootrec /fixboot
    > bootrec /rebuildbcd

    (I had found the above commands after Googling around. This was new to me as i was more familiar with Windows XP ‘fixmbr’ command)

    9) I crossed my fingers and restarted my laptop ….

    10) Windows Vista booted up successfully !!!

    Cheers,
    Sunil

39. hey i was wondering where is the 32 bit vista recovery im in dire need after a virus took out my windows updater

40. I spent the day wrestling with an unbootable Vista laptop cuz I was dumb enough to install XP to an external hard drive, just to see what would happen. Of course, what would happen is that my machine became impossible to boot. A friend found this for me and the CD I installed it on is worth its weight in gold. I booted the Vista laptop with it and repaired the system in a flash.

    The key phrase in the recovery log was:

    “Boot sector code for system disk partition is corrupt. … Repair action: Boot sector repair. … Result: Completed successfully.”

    LOVE IT!

41. i dont cane download the som called “windows vista´´ how download im the?

42. Windows cannot open the reqired file E:\sources\install.wim. The file does not exist. make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation. error code: 0x80070002

    I get this when I click (Instal windows) put in the Reg Key, and it does this b/s. All the other options listed in the system recovery options booted from the disc do not work either..

    Startup repair I get this probelm: Startup repair cannot repair this computer automatically send more info to microsoft.. blalabla

    System Restore I get this problem: To perform an offline system restore, you must specify which windows installation you would like to restore.
    For example, If the installation located in “c:\windows” should be restored, enter thefollowing command: rstrui.exe/OFFLINE:C:\Windows.

    Windows Complete PC restore I get this problem: a valid backup location cound not be found. Windows cannot find a backup on this compuer. attach the backup hard disk or insert the final DVD from a backup set and click retry.

    command prompt: I just don’t know what to type its staying in ( x:\sources> )

    Any detailed help would be grand. I greatly appreciate it.

    Angela

43. I just contacted hp and told them that the recovery partition failed, and the OS is not Booting.. and said that when I got the laptop i tried to make recovery cd’s and they wouldn’t create, so he said he’s going to send me a CD of windows Vista to fix the problem.. (Crossing fingers)

    Now my computer will not do anything except go to a black screen with a white cursor on the top left.. I hate waiting.. sigh*

44. I downloaded the torrent burned it to a cd with imgburn. I then booted my computer with this cd and at first the screen says loading files.
    Then the next screen shows “INSTALL WINDOWS” in the upper left dialog box, with Large type in center “WINDOWS VISTA”.
    There are three dropdown line boxes. Below the “WINDOWS VISTA”.

    The first line states “Language to Install”.
    below that line,”Time and Currenct Format”.
    below that line,”Keyboard or Imput Method”.

    It then reads “Enter Your Language and Other Preferences and Click “Next” to continue.
    “INSTALL”??????
    I thought it would give me options to recover, like rolling back to a former restore point or fixing the problem that caused vista not to boot properly? Reset admin password? etc.

45. Hey Victor

    Yea you have to go through that stuff in the beginning and then when it starts to install it will give you the options you are looking for (without actually installing anything)

    steph

46. I downloaded this file and burnt it as a image, the program work no problem however after inserting my product number the error E://Sources/Install.win file does not exist error code 0x80070002 comes up

    if anyone can assist please do it seems like a lot of ppl have this problem, is there no solution?

47. I tried this disk but it can’t reinstall windows (Can’t find Install.wim?), right now i’m using my dad’s laptop as Windows Vista keeps not responding when I log on

48. i am facing problem with my laptop. few days before it was working just fine and sudenly it stopped. i cannot boot my machine. vista automatic repair also couldn’t find the root cause of problem. i also tried burning recover cd and boot from that. but without any success..
    computer guru please help me out

49. Hi, will this work if i have xp installed?… i had vista on my laptop when i bought it then i put xp on it. well now i want vista back on it and i’m trying to restore it. i still have the backup vista partition. is thier anyway to install vista back on my laptop.?

50. does the windows 86x recovery disk work on a windows vista 32x. cause iam using a 32x.