Topic: Crapped out Vista & no install disks.....

[NJAntman]

My nephew has Vista on his laptop and it won't go past the bios page. And unfortunately he has no idea where the manufacturer recovery disks are. Anyone out there have a link to any quick nifty utility (CD sized) programs that will either jump past Vista or at least show if the harddrive is alive?

[Nemesis]

You could try Gnome Partition Editor a.k.a. GParted.  It is a bootable Linux CD and should at the very least be able to read your HD partition information.  I used it to repartition my netbook drive (Win7 Starter Edition) without issue.

[Bonk]

I've found this helpful:

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Environment

Get the manuals for the machine. Read them. Find out if the recovery partitions are still present. Can you run them? Do you need to?

Other key point I have noticed with laptops... the new "bios" actually not really bios anymore...  - power it all down, take the battery out, let it sit five, carefully remove and reseat the harddrive, put the battery back in, plug it in... boot up. Sometimes this is all you need to do.

[FCM_SFHQ_XC]

you can also if you have the ability to do so, grab the drive out of the laptop and put it in another as a second drive to examine it.

[NJAntman]

Great links! He should be able to make some headway with those.

And interesting point about the laptop bios. I had tried a battery reset on the wife's crapped out laptop, but hadn't thought of reseating the hard drive. Of course my luck I'll get the old one back to life after buying the new one. Got to try it just to know.