Technological Guru needed

[libertylove4]

If I cannot find the recovery CD what should I do then?

[CardShark]

you'll have to find a vista disk so you can repair or re-install the operating system.

[libertylove4]

Thanks for the help...I shall try and track down my recovery disk and if not will try and get a vista disk. Right now I'm most mourning the loss of my iTunes library and my purchases that I didn't back-up (I know very stupid of me).

[CardShark]

oh you can recover them easily.
Burn like a Knoppix live cd or somin and boot into that.

Download Knoppix Live CD or DVD, Get Documentation and Help

I've had yet to try it but Trinity rescue kit is supposed to be real good!
Trinity Rescue Kit: Download

[James]

Check with your friends to see if any have a external hard drive with vista installed, f8 and redirect boot up to external hard drive to bring up laptop run recovery program from external source.

[CardShark]

Check with your friends to see if any have a external hard drive with vista installed, f8 and redirect boot up to external hard drive to bring up laptop run recovery program from external source.

Can that be done now?
Last time i remember i had to use bartPE to move around a very very basic version of xp.

[Rychard the Lionheart]

Does the laptop hd have only one partition? If it has a C & D drives, can you not copy the OS onto the D drive and restore C drive from D.

[libertylove4]

Tomorrow I am taking my laptop to our local computer guy. A friend of mine had a problem similar to mine and he was able to fix it. It would be great if I didn't lose many files, but I think they are lost forever. It's a good thing he is a young gay guy, there might be some questionable content on there that would scar an unsuspecting straight man lol. But anywho thanks for the input. I am so inept with anything technological it's not even funny.

[CardShark]

Does the laptop hd have only one partition? If it has a C & D drives, can you not copy the OS onto the D drive and restore C drive from D.

Thats why you require the repair cd I'm not so sure as if you can just copy it over.

[Rychard the Lionheart]

I have not tried it so I can not vouch for it to work, but you do need a copy of the OS to copy on to the other drive. This is hindsight but I would reccommend that if the C drive is big enough, to partition it into at least two drives. This allows data like music and movies files to be stored on the other partition, so if the OS fails, all you have to do is reformat C drive and not lose the data. Unless the whole HD gets screwed, you should be safe.

I'm not an IT expert but you learn these things when it happens to you.