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General discussion

windows vista help

Sep 16, 2007 8:17AM PDT

how do you do a desructive restore in vista home premium. It is an
upgrade and i want to reinstall the upgrade i tried to put in the disc
on the vista desktop and run it but it says loading and then an error code 0x0. So how do i reinstall an upgrade

Discussion is locked

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Start with the base OS...
Sep 16, 2007 9:23PM PDT

First, you can't do a destructive restore from within Windows. (It's like demolishing a building from the inside while you're in it, it just don't work.) Second, you cannot do a destructive recovery with an upgrade license alone since it requires the presence of a previous, qualifying version of Windows. (Yes, I know of the design loophole here but Microsoft disapproves of its use.) Thus, you'll need to perform a non-destructive recovery using the original OS's CD and then perform the upgrade to Vista. Once you've got it setup you may consider investing in a drive cloning/imaging/ghosting application such as Norton Ghost or Acronis TrueImage, letting you backup your entire hard drive, including the OS, to prevent future problems like this.

John

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I think this is what you want to do.
Sep 16, 2007 11:28PM PDT

Put the DVD in the drive and boot to it and install the new Vista operating system on the partition that has the operating system{Windows XP for an upgrade} on it now...Windows will warn you it will be destroyed...say yes...and presto...you will have a new operating system...

Enter your product key when you do it or if you don't want to enter you product upgrade key say NO and install Vista and later on you can activate it with your product upgrade key....

But of course none of this can be done unless you do it from within the Windows XP system. In other words you boot from within Windows XP and the DVD vista operating system install opens.

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Right now the OS is Vista...
Sep 17, 2007 8:54AM PDT

That's fine if you're starting off with Windows XP and want to perform the upgrade, but it sounds like kyleryanm currently has Vista installed and needs to know where to go from there. In that case you need to start by performing a clean install from the (presumably) Windows XP CD.

John