the kids' Acer from Future Shop crashed...

[Darren Dirt]

...and the system image restore ain't working (from backup I did 4 months ago, and amazingly neither did the FACTORY DEFAULT restore >_< )

Basically, the kids messed up the old one by installing too much crap (spyware, malware, who knows?) and I was hoping a "restore from last backup" would let it be functional again (it was shutting down unannounced, Internet Explorer was completely broken, etc.)

So when I tried the restore from IMAGE, it was so messed up it somehow didn't SEE the image (it was on the "D" drive, when I did the image I confirmed it could "see" it, not thinking the Acer software was so stupid it might somehow "lose" the image).

So I had no choice but to do the factory reset -- goodbye 2 hours of installing apps and patching Windoze Launched it, watched the DOS windows popup and things happen... From what I could see during the "restore" process, it seems to have successfully completed most of it, re-partitioned the drive, reformatted, then tried to do its file copying so the next restart would actually launch the Windows Vista installer -- but it seemed to have got frozen close to the end, and upon restarting it is now saying BOOTMGR is missing


Dionne doesn't think she has the receipt (bought it in like May2009) so I think I'm SOL when it comes to taking it Future Shop and telling them to do the factory reset (I'll phone and see if they have a way of looking up orders, doubt it though).

Anyway, wondering if any of you have the ability to lend me some kind of CD with a keyless Windoze Vista on it (no need for W7, I know that would be asking too much this soon). I know Back In The Day there were "corporate versions" that didn't require "activation", but I suspect that was only up until Windows XP. Actually, come to think of it, maybe XP might be preferable -- if you have THAT I wouldn't complain, that would be a nice solid OS for the kids' purposes until Dionne decides to upgrade to Windows 7 a few years from now maybe.

Thanks guys. Hate being the "tech guy" in my family, but I'm not even really that anymore, I've drifted so far away from this stuff that I don't even have any bootable CDs kicking around that I know of, let alone any OS install CDs...

[Lazybones]

Larger purchases from futureshop get put on their PO system and can normally be looked up by the customers phone number. If it was only in May of this year it should still be in their main system.

[Thorin]

Yeah, what Bones said, if you gave their phone number when you asked they can look it up in their system for you.  First time I got asked for my phone number I said, "You don't need it", but the explanation I got was that it allowed them to still help me if I lost the receipt.  Which made sense, so I gave 'em my number.

Hopefully you (or Dionne) did too.

Also, do you have a Vista DVD?  If you do, pop it in, change your BIOS to boot from CD/DVD, and use the Repair option from the Vista DVD.  Apparently this works miracles (although I don't own Vista so I've never had to do it).

[Darren Dirt]

Also, do you have a Vista DVD?  If you do, pop it in, change your BIOS to boot from CD/DVD, and use the Repair option from the Vista DVD.  Apparently this works miracles (although I don't own Vista so I've never had to do it).

cheap Acer system --> no CD/DVD given. only "restore" comes from built-in software, which as I said *appeared* to work, it did a partition + imagerealod/reformat + copy of patches/files, then on reboot seemed to fail. So i guess this weekend I'll be dropping by FS and if they can't do it for me, I hope one of you might have at least XP to restart with... if not, Dionne'll just to have by W7 sometime in the future (not "my problem", exactly)