Vista (x86) Recovering Disk

[muse092808]

Okay. If I follow what you are saying. You have one hard disc in a desktop system. You have restored Windows Vista 32-bit from the Acer recovery disk for an Acer M5461 desktop. You also have a Windows 7 installation on this hard disk in a different primary partition. Is that correct?

Which of the two Os’s is towards the front of the hard disk?

Can you now boot into Windows Vista?

You are partially right...Sorry I've not been on since last Thurs...I guess I've not explained it well...here goes.

I have 2 drives (SATA) on the Acer desktop...1) ghost copy of original with Vista only and is now bootable using the Acer supplied recovery disk. 2) My original drive which I had added win7 to dual boot Vista/win7. I did something to the BCD..now neither OSs will boot (ViSTA on C: partition Win7 D: partition when connected as primary). I did something when I was editing with EasyBCD 2.0.

Summary: Im working with 2 drives...I boot with primary drive 1) and want to recover 2) to boot both my original Vista and the added Win7. When 1) is primary C: and D: 2) is F: G:

As I said I can see all drives and partitions....all check out. I download the Vista ISO 32bit file (torrent). Couldn't get it to work...HDD drivers would not load.

Thanks for your help. Mike PS I wanted to figure out how I could correct the problem on 2) using 1) at least to correct the BCD for Vista which is on the 2) C: partition. I hope this makes sense.

Addendum:

Success!!! I download the win7 recovery iso image and used it to recover the 2nd partition with win7. I now can use EasyBCD to edit to include the Vista which is on the 1st partition (I hope). Vista may have more than just the BCD wrong. I'm thinking the Win7 recovery should have detected the Vista OS as well but it did not.

 

[muse092808]

Update...I finally found out my problem with Vista, after a little study. It was actually quite simple. When Windows 7 was installed it wiped out my Vista installation. I discovered this only when I got to looking at the HDD and partitions. Went back to look at restoring to the previous OS (Vista) from Windows 7....(windows.old). Nothing was in Windows.old (I guess I didn't specify a backup/recovery). Good thing...I got a backup of my data. Gosh I learned alot with this excercise....haven't been into systems since 2000.(Window 95/98 days). So I'm finished with this problem...I'm getting a new PC and using this one for music conversion (RTR, LP, 8-track, cassette->MP3).

Thanks for the help!