Vista went kaput!

[TheBrade]

Well mine did anyway. Kind of a sob story from my perspective anyway.

(was) Running a HP Pavilion Dv7 laptop with Vista Home Premium 64b

I woke up and installed an automatic update from the Vista OS, restarted and then turned it off to take it with me to classes (a laptop being semi-essential to the college student nowadays). I set it up, powered it on, all is normal until post, it asks if I want to run a start up repair operation (or something like that) I thought to myself that it didn't shut down with problems or anything, so why would it need to repair? I let it repair anyway, but when Windows started up, there wasn't anything there (save for the cursor). No menus, icons, taskbar, nothing...I couldn't right click and after a minute of hitting ctrl+alt+delete the screen changed from black to blue (almost the same color as the BSOD) but still I couldn't do anything.

I figured that if I forced it off and started it up again it might work...wrong it didn't, I went through this process a few more times trying to use a system version that worked properly last time, all 3 versions of safe mode, and everything else. Checked BIOS, ran diagnostics, etc. No official errors or anything, I then resigned myself to using the partition set aside for system recovery to try and fix the problem, or reformat my HDD. But even that didn't work, after about an hour or so with HP's techsupport they deduced that the OS was corrupt, and I'd have to buy the system recovery disks (which I would have, but after spending almost copious amounts of money for blank DVD's none of them would work in the recovery disk creation program).

But I'm not ready to shell out more money yet, my friend has a Vista Ultimate OS disc, I'm curious if I could use that to restore my system? (yes I know I wrote a bit of filler there but I'm really stressed over this, basically losing a whole days worth of work and potentially all my files).

I guess I'm looking for peoples opinions, ideas, thoughts, and everything.
-Brady

 

[nostaw5]

Firstly does it come up with this sometimes: There is no OS installed or C:\windows32\drivers is missing or corrupt. then you have a problem... second microsoft makes it impossible to have 2 of the same OS from the SAME cd... i tried when my system went down BUT... IF YOU CAN recover with a partiton recovery when you press F1 OR F10 or whatever try insert your friends OS cd and try again as that also seemed to work with me... thirdly all your data will be lost... LASTLY if you have system restore with recovery tools then try and use that... sorry thats all the help i can give you

 

[SIW2]

Yes, you can boot any MS vista dvd any install any Edition of Vista.

If you enter the Home Premium product key - that is what will be installed no matter what Edition it says on the dvd.

You could use the product key stickered on the side of the pc. You might have to ring the manufacturer to activate, often it just activates straightaway.

If you don't format the partition during the install process - all the existing contents of the partition will be saved into a folder called Windows.old,. You can fish your data out of there afterwards.