Wanted: Vista recover disk

[MarkS]

Wanted: Vista home basic disk for Toshiba Equium A100-027 laptop.
I need to wipe and reinstall this dog of an operating system, as it cannot repair itself.
Alternative vista disks considered.

Many thanks in advance.

Mark

[mamasboy]

Have you checked to see if it has a recovery partition?

[mamasboy]

From a google search:



1) Hold down the power button for 10 (ten) seconds to switch off your machine.

2) Press and hold the 0 (zero) key and at the same time, tap the power button once to switch on your notebook.

3) When the machine Starts beeping; release the 0 key.

4) When prompted by the warning screen; select Yes to continue with the system recovery.

5) Select Recovery of Factory Default Software; click Next.

6) Select Recover to out-of-box state click Next again.

7) Click Next to Start recovery.

Or.

Switch on and immediately start tapping F8 - Highlight "repair my computer" by using the arrow keys.

You`ll find the option for factory restore in there.

[mamasboy]

OR


Your options are to use the built in system recovery/restore partition or a set of system recovery disc set. It is always good to have the recovery/install disc set.

Order the system recovery/install disc set here by serial number, model number.
https://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais…

How to restore your Toshiba laptop PC to its factory fresh software condition
https://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais…

[MarkS]

Errata: Vista home PREMIUM required.

FYI My level of PC experience: Very good with XP et al, very poor with Vista (I've always tried to stay well clear of Vista).

History of PC: Before I was asked to look at it: Unknown. Owner has not got, nor created any recover disks (that sounds familiar!)

While I have looked at it:

PC is extremely slow, continuously disk accessing. Some windows updates will install, others will fail for no apparent reason. When left alone, Vista seems unable to repair itself.

AVG declares it as virus free, I would tend to agree.

HDAT2 found a corrupted sector and repaired it, since then it has not found any more bad sectors.

Dskchk found 2 errors, repaired them (mscorlib.dll and ehres.dll.mui....). Then the next time I run dskchk it finds exactly the same errors. So it would appear the FS is unable to fix the errors.

Memcheck has passed the memory (1GB).

I believe therefore that the hardware is in good working order.

There is no option anywhere within Windows programs, nor on the desktop to create recovery disks.

Tried "How to restore your Toshiba laptop PC to its factory fresh software condition
https://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais…".
Pressing 0 while turning on the laptop does not give me a recovery warning screen.

I suspect that either the recovery partition has been corrupted, or that in the past, Vista has been reinstalled, removing the recovery partition.

Running Knoppix 6.4.4 only shows one partition SDA2 on the harddrive (Question:Is SDA1 unreadable?).

Owner's data has been backed up to an external HD.

An extra 1GB of memory is on order.

I guess I need Vista home PREMIUM installation disks, which is where I came in.

Any knowledgeable help will be appreciated.

[psicobra]

turn laptop on keep tapping F8 key when the menu pops up there will be an option at the top of the list called repair my PC select that then you will have a lot of options one of which is to restore your PC to factory defaults. give that a try

Andy

[guru]

Hi Mark,

It sounds like the HDD is toast to be honest. Any bad sectors are bad news as on hard drives there are quite a few 'spare' sectors on the disk that the controller will magically map in without the OS even knowing, when it gets to the point the OS knows about it the controller has run out of spare sectors to allocate. Not sure if you remember MFM and RLL drive where you had to manually enter the bad sectors which were on a label on the drive but it's a similar thing with IDE / SATA disks except you should never have to do anything. In my experience when you get to that stage the disk is failing and will only get worse.
If you have SMART monitoring enabled then it should report that the disk is failing.

With regards to the OS rather then reinstall Vista (which is S***) why not drop back down to XP? I always advise clients to use Windows 7 or on older hardware XP. If you have a valid Vista key you should be able to call M$ and ask for an XP one to use downgrade rights. You can then use any media for the installation.

[BeeJay55]

Abandon the idea of Windows and install Ubuntu. Free and a fast OS with free apps including an Office package. You will not regret it.

[MarkS]

Originally Posted by psicobra

turn laptop on keep tapping F8 key when the menu pops up there will be an option at the top of the list called repair my PC select that then you will have a lot of options one of which is to restore your PC to factory defaults. give that a try

Andy

There is NO option to repair my PC, the top option is to start in safe mode.

How does one go about getting an XP license number from M$?

[Southern Storm]

You cant anymore. Downgrade rights are no longer applicable under microsoft licensing. Ended earlier this year. Microsoft will not give you a key. However, when it was allowed and i was on the phone to microsoft to exercise my downgrade rights from Windows 7 to XP i was told to 'use any key form any other machine with XP on it to activate the OS'. In theory as long as their is a certificate of authenticity on the PC case, that is your MS license. If you were to un the xp install disk on the machne, enter any xp key to activate it will work. In theory though downgrade rights are no longer applicable, it will be hard to prove otherwise and an old Toshiba laptop for a home user is last of microsofts problems.