oban

I had a minor catastrophe last week. After updating a motherboard: Vista decided to not start anymore. It gave up the blue screen of death and restart right after the boot.

Someone on this board told me it could be a chipset driver problem, and to use a PE disc to install the chipset drivers.

New Motherboard Caused Vista Fail...

I started by making another Vista installation to create a PE disk -- using WAIK-- in the hopes of saving the original installation.


QUESTION:

Supposing that updating the chipset drivers did not help, and I couldn't make the first installation start up successfully, can I at least transfer my system settings and the registry from my original installation?

I never backed up my system...and it'd be a huge waste to have to install all of my programs again. But I have access to everything in the original installation.

So...please help.

l_b_rex

Judging by the amount of OS' you have ,you probably deleted the recovery partition if there was one. Without that option I would say there is no way to do what you are asking.

Vista just kicked your a@#!

PS. You don't want to use this registry anyways. As soon as you load this registry you will have the exact same issue.

oban

I didn't delete any partition. I created a new one in another hard drive on the same computer. So nothing got lost in the original install.

How do I access the recovery partition? When I was installing Ubuntu, I saw a choice for Windows XP/2003, which I thought was odd because I never installed it. I tried using loading that, but it also failed with blue screen of death.

Mcninjaguy

I think to access the recovery oftware you press F10 while booting up.

oban

The recovery software is also throwing an error. Something like "int15.sys was not found."

jcgriff2

Hi -

int15.sys belongs to Acer Recovery. The Acer Vista recovery DVD that you are booting up with is not recognizing your system or assuming it does, is then seeing the XP/ Server 2003 system that was (partially) installed when PE was used.

Your prior Vista installation is gone. You had successful boot-up with Linux, so you should be able to see the Vista NTFS drive. You cannot, however, copy installed programs over to a new Vista installation. ALl programs must be re-installed.

Since the recovery partition is damaged, you will need to call Acer for replacement recovery DVDs. You will also most likely have to contact Microsoft b/c the mobo change will affect hash figures making Internet validation of your Vista key code improbable.

While waiting for the Vista recovery DVDs from Acer, install Windows 7 RC1. Download and burn the ISO.

Windows 7 - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/
ImgBurn for ISO bootable DVD - http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download

No matter what you decide to do, you will have to do a low-level re-format of your hard drive. Use KillDisk - http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

.

oban

Thanks jcgriff2.

Here is what I am doing. I installed Vista in another partition and I am now trying to move the important files to the new drive, and then planning to format the old drive.

I gave up on doing it through Acer's recovery console. They don't seem to support my 3 year old computer's model, anyway.

I did install Windows 7, build 7100. Very impressive. There were some issues with Flash, which wouldn't start and I couldn't install Adobe Air. So I didn't keep using it because I didn't want to take the chance of finding out it didn't support something I use on a regular basis like Flash, Photoshop or the tweak tools that change the behavior of Windows, like TweakUI and Moo0. When it comes out of RC status, I'll give it another try.