Vista Tutorial - Repair Install For Vista

I followed your steps and selected Active but it came back with error "the selected partition cannot be marked as an active partition because of its type"

Should i just reinstall a fresh copy of vista? If so how do i recover the product code?

Unless you have the key number on the sticker as descibed above, I do not think you will be able to since you cannot boot into Vista. Do you have a OEM computer with a recovery partition, or it is one that you installed a retail copy of Vista on?

If it is a OEM copy, then doing a factory restore will restore your Vista back like the day you first got it with the product key number intact.

Hi
You might want to try Belarc Advisor. It's a program that basically audits your PC, and one of the things I've used it for is to get my product key from it. It's about 3/4 of the page down under the section titled "software licenses" Good luck, hope it works for you.
Rick

Some experience info:

I had a SFC failure that SFC could not repair so I needed to so a repair install of a Vista Ultimate x64 SP2 system. I slipstreamed an SP2 disc from a Vista SP1 DVD and found that I did not have the upgrade option. I would get a message about the upgrade needing to be a newer version. Some comments here suggested that the problem might be due to the host system having newer updates.

So, I recreated the slipstreamed SP2 and installed all the updates before finishing the SysPrep dialog with OOBE/Generalize/ShutDown. Same problem. It appears then that the problem is not an issue with the actual updates/version in the slipstreamed system but with what version the slipstreamed system thinks it is. Some version number someplace is not getting updated.

Needing to get the system working, I sprung for a TechNet subscription (I won't use pirated copies). This will also give me a try-before-buy opportunity on other software for the next year. The ISO I downloaded from MS ran and had the upgrade option available so I could do a repair install. This further suggests that it is a slipstream version problem and not a latest-update problem. I have not tried to do a clean install with the slipstreamed disk.

It repaired the SFC items that could not be repaired by SFC . However, my cookies were removed to special folders and I don't know what else . I'm going to poke around to see what is missing, but I suspect it will be easier to do a Windows Easy Transfer to a file to save stuff and then bring it back in after the repair. Since I made a backup of the drive before the repair install, I can keep restoring the drive and try things until I get it right.

Thanks for a great web site!

More experience info:
I used an MS SP2 disc since I could not get s slipstreamed SP2 disc (from my original SP1 disc) to work. I found that the only things that appeared to be missing was IE stuff, so I suspect that since the repair install went from IE8 on the host to IE7 in the SP2 repair disc, it can't maintain the files and settings. I decided to solve that by slipstreaming in all the MS updates and using that disk to do the repair. Just follow the Vista Slipstream SP2 instructions and add network drivers and updates at the step where you would have added service packs. I also added video and disk drivers so all the most important stuff would be intact. I wanted it to fit on a one-sided DVD so I could not install all the updates or toys desired. Note that for a repair install you don't need the disk to be bootable so you can just use WinRAR to unpack the ISO and your favorite disc burner to remake it with a new install.wim file.

The repair install then took about two hours and, as warned, some device driver stuff broke. CD/DVD drives would not install. Doing a search on that I found a registry edit to make them appear, but neither Roxio nor iTunes (CD ripping/burning) would work. Reinstalling Roxio went fine, but iTunes was a mess. I suspect that the iTunes (un)installer is not very robust because it could not recover from a slightly messed up registry. Uninstalling left iTunes CD/DVD stuff all over that had to be manually edited out to get an install to work with the CD/DVDs function in iTunes. Best would be to uninstall CD/DVD software before the repair install as that might avoid the issues, or maybe slipstream it in.

IE8 then needed all the already-loaded activex controls, as well as ieSpell, to be allowed to execute. The scanner part of my HP All-In-One wouldn't scan and so I needed to reinstall the drivers. This wasted a bit of time because though the latest driver is dated 9/2009 it is actually a lot older. All the early 2009 updates were needed to get it to work properly. Go figure.

The system appears healthy again, at last.

Hi um... I attempted to do this but my reinstall disk just goes straight from the update question to the custom or upgrade question and doesnt allow me to upgrade. I had been getting error code 800700C1 while trying to update and then ran the CMD sfc/scannow thing and found that I have several unrepairable files. What should I do?

Hello RynoXD, and welcome to Vista Forums.

Are you running the Vista installation disc from within Vista and not from boot? Is the installation disc the exacte same version (ex: with SP1 and/or SP2) that you currently have installed?

Yes I tried running the reinstallation from within Vista; I currently have service pack 2 and I'm am pretty sure that the disk does not, since I got my computer from before then, I think it just has the original Vista, if this is the reason why it doesnt work is there anything i can do to fix my computer still?

RynoXD,

It seems that you may need to do a clean reinstall of Vista.

ugh thats what I was trying to avoid anyways thank you