Compaq Vista to Win 7 Upgrade failed - can't boot or re-image

wsj

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May 15, 2011
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18,510
A friend tried to upgrade his Compaq to Windows 7, it failed and now we can't boot to either OS. Tried to re-image back to Vista but F11 will not function. Can I somehow boot directly into the recovery partition and initiate the restore process?
HELP!!!
 

wsj

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May 15, 2011
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18,510


No, the recovery partition is there but the Upgrade disk fails due to the CD Driver issue (seems like a common thing) and the computer will not boot. Is there a way to change that to the active partition, and if so will I be able to do the Re-Image back to the original Vista from there?
 
Normally on a Compaq the recovery is entered by pressing F10 at boot not F11 so try that ! -- as long as the partition is intact you should be able te reset it to factory condition but the problem then is you lose all info from the HDD so you might want to put it into another system first to backup anything you wanted to keep !
 

wsj

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May 15, 2011
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18,510
f10 takes you to BIOS Setup, tried it and couldn't find a place to switch the boot partition there. f11 is what you're supposed to use in this case.
As far as the data, it's all been backed up and he has everything he needs off the computer so that's not an issue.
My main concern/question is - is there a way to boot into the Image partition and if so can I initiate the restore to day 1 setup?
 

wsj

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May 15, 2011
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18,510
An update to what I've tried/found out...
Apparently MS made the installer poorly. It seems to mostly affect the Vista 64 to Win7 64 update next to impossible in many instances. The CD Driver that loads the Installation disk ceases to recognize the SATA CD ROM after it gets into the Installer process. This computer does not have an IDE drive so swapping a different CD drive doesn't seem to be an option.
I have created a bootable USB drive and loaded the contents of the Upgrade CD (including hidden files) and ran that. It got farther than any other try I've made, but still doesn't work. It did the install (mostly) and when it rebooted and started up in Win 7 it got through several stages before giving the error that Windows has encountered an error and will shut down the computer.

I really need to figure a way to re-install the Vista and get back to a stable setup to start over with.
 

wsj

Distinguished
May 15, 2011
7
0
18,510
An update to what I've tried/found out...

Apparently MS made the installer poorly. It seems to mostly affect the Vista 64 to Win7 64 update next to impossible in many instances. The CD Driver that loads the Installation disk ceases to recognize the SATA CD ROM after it gets into the Installer process. This computer does not have an IDE drive so swapping a different CD drive doesn't seem to be an option.

I have created a bootable USB drive and loaded the contents of the Upgrade CD (including hidden files) and ran that. It got farther than any other try I've made, but still doesn't work. It did the install (mostly) and when it rebooted and started up in Win 7 it got through several stages before giving the error that Windows has encountered an error and will shut down the computer.

I really need to figure a way to re-install the Vista and get back to a stable setup to start over with.
 

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