I'm Gonna Blow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Right here goes !!!!! i have been running windows vista on my laptop for the past 8 months with no problems.... recentley i did something really bad and compressed my hard drive and it would no longer boot.Sooooooooo after much searching on the net i found something about bootmgr fix through dos, which i did but that did not work . Someone suggested slaving the hard drive to another machine which i did and it uncompressed..WAHEY.....or so i thought . When i put it back in the laptop it said Bootmgr is compressed so i put the vista disk and ran the startup repair. this seemed to work for the first boot then on the second nothing happened it just would not boot so i put in the vista disc and an error message appeared, something along the lines of a hardware change has happened since the last boot and windows could not find the drivers. the hardware in question is the cd/dvd rewriter.......................so my problem is now how do i install vista on the harddrive when i can not get the disc to run in the drive???????

p.s i have formatted the hard drive so it is a clean install and RC1 of vista which i have will seem to run (have only tried it to see if it gets further than the real version)

Any help will be appreciated

I remember i accidently compressed my C drive and it wouldn't boot.
i searched google and tried the uncompressing it through dos but that didn't work.

what i ended up doing was loading the vista disc and then to repair computer. when it looks for which OS to load i clicked on load drivers and the My Computer dialog box came up and from there i went to the screen where i could see all my drives and right clicked on my C drive>Properties and then just unchecked Compress this drive to same more space then i just restarted and everything booted up fine...

I’m not a fan of laptops but what you can do is use an external USB DVD drive to install it. And depending on your Bios Boot sequence, you can boot from the USB drive and install Vista very easily. Some systems, Pressing F9 will give you the boot menu, others F12 and I had seen others F2.. Another option which is a bit more technical is to partition the drive to FAT32 and copy the WinVista DVD on to it. Reboot your laptop via a USB drive or Floppy drive and then start install process from the FAT32 drive partition. This is how I use to do it when I had WinXP. One other option which is a bit to the extreme is to reimage a working copy of Windows Vista to your laptop drive. You can use Symantec Ghost software to copy one drive to another. But you have to make sure that the BitLocker setting is not set on the working drive because it will sense that the drive has change and it will prevent you from logging to the new drive. 50 ways to skin the cat [ an old expression that is ] I hope this helps a bit.

See if F8 will take you to the advanced vista boot options. Then, and good luck, try restarting to last known good configuration. I have to say that I am pessimistic about this approach working. But, well, what the heck?

Znod,
Pressing F8 will not help astralavista because he is already formatted the drive. There is no OS on it for him boot from. He needs a way to boot from a DVD drive to be able to install Vista. Using a bootable USB memory stick, An attached floppy drive or an external DVD drive are one of the ways to get him going.

Thans for all the input but i have sorted the problemm now .