A customer brought me a computer with Vista (SP1) and the report that the Internet was acting squirrelly. And it was. After playing with it and a few queries back to the customer, I concluded that it had probably got interrupted in the middle of an update, leaving it in an inconsistent state.
Skipping over a few dead ends, I got to the point, after backing up their data, that the best approach was going to be to recover it from the recovery partition. Ooops! Come to find out, the disk drive was gradually failing (may have been the initial problem), and the failure had taken out some sectors from the recover partition. So the recover failed AFTER reformatting the C: drive.
I have a new HDD, and I have the backup, which is a partition image, but not a disk clone. I could restore the image onto the new disk, but I suspect it would not boot. (Would fixmbr work around that?) Furthermore, it would still be a screwed-up installation of Windows.
What to do? I do not possess a Vista install CD. I do, however, have a working Vista system. What if I cloned that drive to the new drive? Should result in a bootable drive, eh? (May have to fix drivers with fix_hdc). Then I could delete my personal garbage, restore the customer's personal stuff, and all is copacetic, right?
Anyway, that's my question. Also would I run into Windows authentication issues, since the cloned image would have a different product key?
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Randy4053
Skipping over a few dead ends, I got to the point, after backing up their data, that the best approach was going to be to recover it from the recovery partition. Ooops! Come to find out, the disk drive was gradually failing (may have been the initial problem), and the failure had taken out some sectors from the recover partition. So the recover failed AFTER reformatting the C: drive.
I have a new HDD, and I have the backup, which is a partition image, but not a disk clone. I could restore the image onto the new disk, but I suspect it would not boot. (Would fixmbr work around that?) Furthermore, it would still be a screwed-up installation of Windows.
What to do? I do not possess a Vista install CD. I do, however, have a working Vista system. What if I cloned that drive to the new drive? Should result in a bootable drive, eh? (May have to fix drivers with fix_hdc). Then I could delete my personal garbage, restore the customer's personal stuff, and all is copacetic, right?
Anyway, that's my question. Also would I run into Windows authentication issues, since the cloned image would have a different product key?
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Randy4053
