Many people purchase their computers from a manufacturer such as HP, Sony, Dell, etc. and their operating system is preinstalled with Windows Vista. This means that you normally do NOT get an installation disc. Your manufacturer often gives you a restore disc which may be just an image of your hard drive after the OS was installed.
The problem with this is if you need to fix a boot issue, there is no way for you to boot from your restore disc just to fix that issue. With the restore disc, it will only allow you to restore the hard drive to it’s factory condition, meaning everything you had will be lost.
No matter where you got your desktop or laptop, the recovery disc will be a great asset to you in the event your computer won’t boot. The disc is chock full of utilities that you will need to get your system up and running again.
Directions:
- Extract the ZIP file. You will see an ISO file. This is the image of the Disc.
- Burn the ISO file. There are many programs you can use, but make sure you burn it at a slow speed such as 1x-10x.
- Place the CD in your disc drive and reboot.
- You either have to go into your BIOS and choose your CD drive to be the first boot device or you can press the ESC key at bootup which will open a window that allows you to choose your boot device manually. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. For me, it works about 75%. Changing the boot order in the BIOS always works.
- Follow the on-screen instructions to accomplish what you want to fix.
Tags: vista recovery disc