Free PC Support

[Eami]

Hi all,
New to this forum, hope you can help me.

My Father has a Hp Pavillion Slimline pc, he got it about 3 years ago with Vista Home on it. I do a bit of work on P.C's because its loosly work related, so i do have a bit of knowledge, but i was away travelling. While i was away he had some problem sending messages or something silly, so a neighbour said he would look at it for him.
He told my dad that while he was there he could load on the latest version (windows 7) for him for free, with Office 2007 and 13 years worth of Bit torent Anti virus.
He doesnt know anything about PC's so just trusted him and let him do it.

now the trouble is Windows is starting to fire up messages about not being a legitimate copy, which im sure its not.

So he wants me to put it back to the way it was.

So i thought i would restore the factory image on the partition drive, but its now empty. We have no other discs for the pc.

My sister has the same PC, so is there anyway of taking an image from hers? Im a bit stumped as to what way to go about getting it back to a nice clean, working copy of Vista.

I use Ghost at work for re-imaging Touchscreen PC's with wepos and XP but cant seem to get Ghost to work on my sisters PC. Im using the same drive that i always use with Ghost on it that is bootable from Dos, but then again there aint any Dos on vista is there?

Anyhow ive ranted enough, any advice would be seriously greatly appreciated
Thanks

[JonS]

my perferred tool for imaging computers is Acronis Trueimage
You can pick up a fully working 30 day trial from this web page
http://www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputing/download/
Using that you should be able to create an image from one machine, transfer it to an external drive, boot the second machine with a special recovery CD, and then copy the image back from the external drive
If you have a Seagate or Maxtor drive, then you can download for free from Seagate their DiscWizard software, which is a bespoke version of TrueImage

Having said that, your sister's machine should have built in HP software somewhere to make a set of HP recovery disks. It may be within a desktop utility (explore the HP menu) or it may be from within the "repair my computer" option from the F8 boot menu. I suggest you check the documentation.

Of course you could simply borrow a standard Vista CD of the correct type, install it manually and activate using the HP product key from the CofA. You should be able to use ANY Vista DVD as the version that gets installed is controlled by the CofA key, not by the disk used.


As for Ghost - you need a fairly recent version to work on Vista. Your version is probably too old.

And one final tip: it you do go down the Trueimage path, remember to image the WHOLE drive, not just the windows partition. Otherwise you may run into problems with the boot sector. If you create the HP disks then that wont matter

[JonS]

just found these instruxtion for making a set of Vista recovery disks on a Compaq PC
The HP procedure should be the same - they are the same company

http://www.wikihow.com/Create-Recovery-Discs-for-Windows-Vista-in-HP-Recovery-Manager

[Eami]

Using that you should be able to create an image from one machine, transfer it to an external drive, boot the second machine with a special recovery CD, and then copy the image back from the external drive


What recovery CD, I aint got one?



Of course you could simply borrow a standard Vista CD of the correct type, install it manually and activate using the HP product key from the CofA. You should be able to use ANY Vista DVD as the version that gets installed is controlled by the CofA key, not by the disk used.


Pardon my obvious ignorance, but what is the Cofa key. Is that the code on the PC?



Thanks very much for your help, and for the cd creation instructions, gonna look at it a bit later. Just in work now

[JonS]