Imminent disk failure

Gadgetman496

I have a legit Medion P6612 Laptop with genuine Windows Vista Home Premium.

It's acting the maggot & freezing up all the time.

I'm getting the warning "Imminent disk failure, back up now"

I don't have the Vista Home Premium Disc (there is a recovery partition on the dodgy drive) but I do have the Vista Ultimate Disc.

Can I use the Vista Ultimate to do a clean install on a newly replaced drive using the genuine Home Premium key? Will Vista be installed as Home Premium?

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Cuddlesworth

gadgetman496 wrote: »

I have a legit Medion P6612 Laptop with genuine Windows Vista Home Premium.

It's acting the maggot & freezing up all the time.

I'm getting the warning "Imminent disk failure, back up now"

I don't have the Vista Home Premium Disc (there is a recovery partition on the dodgy drive) but I do have the Vista Ultimate Disc.

Can I use the Vista Ultimate to do a clean install on a newly replaced drive using the genuine Home Premium key? Will Vista be installed as Home Premium?

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No it will be installed as Ultimate and look for the equivalent key.

dlofnep

Sounds like a hardware fault, rather than a software/file system fault. You could try chkdisk - but chances are, your drive will need to be replaced.

Gadgetman496

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

No it will be installed as Ultimate and look for the equivalent key.

Is there anyway that the recovery partition can be used to install on a new drive?

Can it be imaged (using something like Acronis) or copied to an external drive?

Cuddlesworth

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Is there anyway that the recovery partition can be used to install on a new drive?

Can it be imaged (using something like Acronis) or copied to an external drive?

http://download.cnet.com/Macrium-Reflect-Free/3000-2242_4-10845728.html?tag=mncol;pop

You could use something like this to transfer the recovery partition to the new drive.

corkcomp

+1 for the macrium sw.. back up all your stuff and try a drive to drive copy but make sure you dont copy the new drive over the old one

Gadgetman496

Funny, even though the laptop boots fine aside from the "Imminent disk failure, back up now" message, none of the imaging software is able to successfully copy the C:\ drive, it fails to read at a given point each time (including Acronis).

They will however allow me to image the recovery partition on drive \

There's no doubt that the drive is close to being goosed & has to be replaced.

I wonder if I could use Acronis to restore the recovery partition to the new drive & then do a restore??

Would I need to create the 20GB recovery partition on the new drive before attempting a restore of the backedup image or would Acronis be smart enough to do that?

Sure if all else fails I'll do a clean install on the new drive but that would leave no restore partition on the Laptop?

Any thoughts?

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Mits

Hi,

You image and set it up to ignore errors. I used norton ghost on a drive that was failing. Also "Hirens" and "ultimate boot CD" have disk image software on them. These packages allow you to boot for a cd and create an image of a disk.

Failing the you could search for a vista home premium torrent but you must be careful with what you download.

good luck

Gadgetman496

Mits wrote: »

Hi,

You image and set it up to ignore errors. I used norton ghost on a drive that was failing. Also "Hirens" and "ultimate boot CD" have disk image software on them. These packages allow you to boot for a cd and create an image of a disk.

Failing the you could search for a vista home premium torrent but you must be careful with what you download.

good luck

Yep, I did try booting from an Acronis boot CD & that allowed me to create the image of the restore partition but not the C:\ drive.

I have a Home Premium Disc now but I'd like to get that original recovery partition back in place.

I could do a clean install & then use Acronis to create a recovery partition & invoke the F11 to recover at startup I suppose (I'm fairly familiar with Acronis) that's why I referr to it so much, not knocking any of the other suggested software by the way.

The machine in question is not my own so I'd like to get it back to factory default if you know what I mean.

I'll experiment when I get the replacement drive.

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PrimalTherapy

since you have a recovery partition can't you burn restore disks?