Yet another Vista Recovery Disk question

M

MidwestDave

Member
Thanks for all the fantastic support in this forum! One of the most useful forums I've been on out here. Unfortunately I am one on the lucky owners of a Window Vista machine which has a corrupted registry and is not longer bootable at all, can't recover from the partition either (no recover point available). It tried to partly rebuild the Windows partition and then hung. After that... zippo, immediate crash, no safe mode, etc. However a hardware check function that still works says all HW is OK. HP a6400f desktop. So, I found all the info about the Vista Recovery/Repair disk. I downloaded the Vista_Recovery_Disc.iso file through uTorrent. I then burned this ISO image using ISO format. So supposedly I should have a bootable recovery disk. However, the HP Pavilion won't boot to the disk, even when the boot order is changed to make the DVD first. It just proceeds to a Windows crash screen. Is there any way to tell if the disk I burned is valid? Maybe it isn't bootable... Or is there some other issue? I found that I can buy the Repair disk for $30 from HP. Or get extended warranty for $100. What an incredible ripoff. Sad but expected. Progress report: Burned another Vista recovery disk and this time, it booted! However it cannot repair the problem. It finds a corrupted registry, then quits. How can this system be recovered? Would a new OS, say Windows 7, be able to be installed on this machine?
 
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With a corrupt registry its clearly time for a re-install. If you have a Windows 7 disc and product key go ahead and install. Otherwise, $30 might be the price to pay to get your machine up and running again.
 
JustinW said:
With a corrupt registry its clearly time for a re-install. If you have a Windows 7 disc and product key go ahead and install. Otherwise, $30 might be the price to pay to get your machine up and running again.
Click to expand...

I finally got the recovery disk to boot. However it did not resolve the registry problem. It also didn't allow me to recover data. So I placed the hard drive in an external enclosure and I am doing file recovery on it. Finally I will have to shell out new $$ for an operating system if I want to use this system, since the HP OEM "Windows-sort-of" operating system is essentially a one use purchase (no media provided). It's quite a racket, as I am getting reminded with this adventure. Linux is looking quite attractive right about now... not sure if I want to feed any more money into these scummy companies.
 
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