How to Create a Vista Recovery Disc

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Click here to read the entire tutorial

^ Yes, definitely. 140Mb would be way too little in the way of files to do much more than provide a seed environment for running specific utilities, like the recovery options.

I'm planning to do a new install of Vista Ultimate, and created this as a standby tool in case something went wrong. I was originally going to upgrade my Home Premium installation, but the general advice seems to be that this has many risks involved and that a clean install is best. A bit of a pain when considering that all of the other installed software needs to be installed yet again. But then it does force a fresh start whereby software that hasn't been used much can be re-evaluated and/or left off initially. I'm going to time various activities in Windows first (start-up, shutdown, and performance of high memory use programs), as a benchmark to compare against a fresh install. I've often felt like Windows installations inherently get more sluggish over time, despite running defragmentation and other techniques to optimize, but I'd like to see my own empirical evidence to support or deny it.

Yeah, I always prefer a clean install myself as well. It does take a bit longer to do, but it's usually a problem free installation as well. At least until I mess it up real good with my experiments. LOL

I hope it goes smothly for you.

One addendum to this tutorial: If you ever run SFC /SCANNOW, the "recdisc.exe" file will end up replaced with the later one. You'll need to copy the pre-SP1 version again and set the permissions accordingly.

Yep, unfortunately running SFC will restore the old non-working default one. I'll add a note to help.

Hello John, and welcome to Vista Forums.

The Vista "Recovery Disc" created using this tutorial will not be able to install Vista. It's only good to use to be able to boot the the "System Recovery Options" screen with. That's all.

Since you have a Acer OEM computer, you would want to create a set of Acer factory recovery discs. These will be able to reinstall your Vista back to factory conditions again. The link below from Acer can help show you how to.

Acer Support: Frequently Asked Questions list for Recovery media and Restoring a system to factory load

Hope this helps,
Shawn

John,

They will restore your Vista back to it's original factory state just like when it first came out of the box. You will be able to use them to restore to the new HDD. You will have to enter the product key number on the COA sticker on your computer to be able to activate Vista afterwards though.

You're most welcome.