Laptop wont boot (vista) "Upgrade" 7?

Wepohn

Wepohn

Wepohn

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Laptop wont boot

Hi guys, so my friend has asked me to take a look at his laptop because it wont boot. It currently has Vista installed on it but when I try to boot it up it shows an error \Boot\BCD the windows boot configuration file is missing. Neither of us have a Vista disc and he wants to keep his files. What are my best options?
 
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Apart from using a Vista DVD to fix your bootloader you can Google a bootload fix for Vista. There are som YouTube videos on the subject, but nothing can beat having your own Vista DVD which will repair it automatically for you.
As a Latop has its own Backup or recovery CD what happened to that? There should be a version of the OEM Operating system on a partition of your Hard disk. If you can find that Partition you can do a recovery from the Partition.
 
Laptop wont boot.

Hi, I got everything backed up and then tried to format it using acronis but it failed to load - Boot drive not detected, so I tried Parted Magic instead and used the secure erase option. That seemed to complete without any errorrs so I tried to install XP which failed blue screened. I went back into Parted Magic and used the file manager and it looked like some of the files from before the format were still there. So I used DBAN instead of the secure erase option but it failed.

I also tried the recovery options before I formatted but they also failed.

Any suggestions?
 
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Nah, it's a mechanical drive but I figured DBAN might have worked. Maybe I'll try another program on the ultimate boot cd.
 
Whichever I seem to use to format it, it either fails or doesn't get rid of everything. In the file viewer it looks like there are 2 partitions one says /root and has 13 files visible and 22 hidden. I think this is what is preventing me from doing a clean installation but I'm not sure how to get rid of these files and really blank out the drive.
 
The most simplest way to format the drive is not to. Delete it. Reboot the system and it should autodetect the drive and your setup cd. Doing a fresh install will effectively wipe the drive because you will have no partition set. Let Windows do it.
 
Usually I've had no problem doing this sort of thing. It auto detects the drive and the setup cd but it still fails. I'm thinking it might have something to do with the root files that I can't delete or maybe the laptop has been limited to only allowing the Compaq/HP version of Vista? in the bios it says, factory installed OS: Vista

Edit - http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=189658 this person seems to have the same problem. I'm not sure it's a driver issue as I've tried XP and 7. The last post someone says it's not possible because of the factory os thing.
 
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