poppafred
Member
Here something I have learned the hard way in the past 48 hours:
If your computer manufacturer sends you a reinstallation DVD with the computer, doing a manual reinstallation of Vista should be your LAST resort. Even if a Microsoft Technical Support technician tells you to do it, Do NOT manually reinstall Windows until you talk to your computer manufacturer's support team.
Here's why:
With most Windows computers being sold today, there is a partition on the hard drive that you can use to recover the system back to as it was when originally shipped. If you do a recovery, you will loose your personal data that you have put on the hard drive but manually reinstalling Windows might be worse, you could loose the hard drive all together. Unless you have a commercially purchased Vista disk, you do not have the utilities to format the hard drive and repartition it, they are not included on the OEM disks any more.
Dell is sending me a new hard drive because a Microsoft Tech had me do a manual reinstall.
Details:
I attempted to install Vista Service Pack 2 from Windows Update but it failed and locked up my computer. It also apparently corrupted some of the system files because a Restore did not completely fix things. I contacted Microsoft Tech Support and the tech there walked me through a manual reinstallation. That worked. I then attempted to upgrade with the Stand Alone SP2 and that seemed to work until I shut down, disconnected the power supply and took the computer into another room. The laptop would not cold boot. I called Dell for help as I should have to start with. The Dell support tech told me that when I manually reinstalled Windows Vista Home Premium, the reinstallation overwrote the only utility on the drive that could be used to access the recovery partition. We used to be able to get to a command prompt outside of the Windows kernel and run our computers as DOS machines. You can NOT do that with a Vista machine. The command prompt is available only INSIDE Vista's "Safe Mode" and trying to run the recovery program from there will be blocked by Vista protecting its core files from being deleted. The manual reinstallation changed the one utility that is accessed by pressing the F8 key, a utility specifically written for my Dell laptop. If you are running Vista on your computer, it is probably set up the same way. That utility correctly refers the OS to the Recovery partition where the image file of the factory installation is stored. After that utility was replaced by my manual reinstallation, the computer could not find that image file and thus the hard drive cannot now be recovered. I was left with two choices. I could either get a new hard drive from Dell or I could buy an over the counter version of Vista.
Luckily, for me, the laptop is only 2 weeks old and Dell is not going to charge me for this replacement hard drive.
I want to repeat myself just to be sure I am being clear to everyone:
Manually reinstalling Vista may make your hard drive recovery partition inaccessible and might cost you a computer.
Call your computer manufacturer's tech support before doing a manual reinstallation!
You might be charged for the call but that will still be cheaper than a new computer!
I hope this is not old business that has already been discussed. I could not find any posts covering it in this forum and I wanted to try to spare someone the grief and a similar fate if at all possible.
Good Luck!
If your computer manufacturer sends you a reinstallation DVD with the computer, doing a manual reinstallation of Vista should be your LAST resort. Even if a Microsoft Technical Support technician tells you to do it, Do NOT manually reinstall Windows until you talk to your computer manufacturer's support team.
Here's why:
With most Windows computers being sold today, there is a partition on the hard drive that you can use to recover the system back to as it was when originally shipped. If you do a recovery, you will loose your personal data that you have put on the hard drive but manually reinstalling Windows might be worse, you could loose the hard drive all together. Unless you have a commercially purchased Vista disk, you do not have the utilities to format the hard drive and repartition it, they are not included on the OEM disks any more.
Dell is sending me a new hard drive because a Microsoft Tech had me do a manual reinstall.
Details:
I attempted to install Vista Service Pack 2 from Windows Update but it failed and locked up my computer. It also apparently corrupted some of the system files because a Restore did not completely fix things. I contacted Microsoft Tech Support and the tech there walked me through a manual reinstallation. That worked. I then attempted to upgrade with the Stand Alone SP2 and that seemed to work until I shut down, disconnected the power supply and took the computer into another room. The laptop would not cold boot. I called Dell for help as I should have to start with. The Dell support tech told me that when I manually reinstalled Windows Vista Home Premium, the reinstallation overwrote the only utility on the drive that could be used to access the recovery partition. We used to be able to get to a command prompt outside of the Windows kernel and run our computers as DOS machines. You can NOT do that with a Vista machine. The command prompt is available only INSIDE Vista's "Safe Mode" and trying to run the recovery program from there will be blocked by Vista protecting its core files from being deleted. The manual reinstallation changed the one utility that is accessed by pressing the F8 key, a utility specifically written for my Dell laptop. If you are running Vista on your computer, it is probably set up the same way. That utility correctly refers the OS to the Recovery partition where the image file of the factory installation is stored. After that utility was replaced by my manual reinstallation, the computer could not find that image file and thus the hard drive cannot now be recovered. I was left with two choices. I could either get a new hard drive from Dell or I could buy an over the counter version of Vista.
Luckily, for me, the laptop is only 2 weeks old and Dell is not going to charge me for this replacement hard drive.
I want to repeat myself just to be sure I am being clear to everyone:
Manually reinstalling Vista may make your hard drive recovery partition inaccessible and might cost you a computer.
Call your computer manufacturer's tech support before doing a manual reinstallation!
You might be charged for the call but that will still be cheaper than a new computer!
I hope this is not old business that has already been discussed. I could not find any posts covering it in this forum and I wanted to try to spare someone the grief and a similar fate if at all possible.
Good Luck!