Urgent help requested.

I own a Compaq Presario CQ50, if that's needed to be known. Vista Home Premium OS.

Now, I've had nearly no problems with this until one of my games couldn't be deleted or started. I proceeded to perform a system recovery with discs provided by... Geeksquad or something like that. Maybe they're an untrusted source... I don't know.

But when using either of the two recovery discs, it says "This PC is not supported by the System Recovery Discs. You will not be able to continue to recover this system from these discs. I even tried a normal system recovery, disc-free, but it said something about Error 1002. So... I just said screw it, but then when I started up my computer, it says BOOTMGR is not found. Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart. (or something like that).

Now I can't do crud. The hard drive check failed, discs over and over again say "This PC is not supported..." blah blah.

The discs given by Geeksquad were DVD + R. 2 discs were provided.

Anyone mind helping? ._.

 

Did, you by any chance, upgrade to _Vista SP1 recently?

 

Possibly, but ONLY if it was included on Windows Automatic Updates.

 

Alright. I was looking around, I thought this could work.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...b1-e838-420a-b065-83960458e2ec&displaylang=en

If I were to burn it on a DVD + R disc with this notebook, could I put it in the malfunctioning one, start it up normally, and... do all that installation stuff?

 

you'd need to find a torrent for vista, it's not illegal if you have the license.

 

Problem is, he may only have an OEM license, and then it becomes dodgy...

Couldn't you contact Compaq (I think they are part of HP ??) and buy a set of recovery discs?
They shouldn't be too expensive.

 

Yes it is illegal, license or not. It is NOT illegal to borrow an install DVD from a friend to do an install using your license. But posting the file on a torrent site and downloading from the same is piracy, like it or not. Not only that it is VERY VERY dangerous. There is no way to tell for sure that what you get is not infected in some way.

Gary

 

If you can download it without actually being part of a share group, its legal. Since torrents share as they download, its illegal

 

I don't think there is ANY legal way to download this EXCEPT from Microsoft. They are the only ones with publishing rights.

It is not even legal to copy a friend's DVD, even if you have a license. (Microsoft has however said it was OK to borrow a copy to install with your own license number.)

Gary