chuma.org

Holy hairballs, it's a blog post?! Anyways. I have been beating up this totall boned Vista laptop owned by an acquaintance. It needs to be reinstalled because the OS is quite hosed - however,

1. I always like to Ghost a hard drive before I format and reinstall, despite how much data people think they have backed up. But Vista is a bitch, and I can't even install Ghost into the OS, and all Boot CDs have failed me, no DOS USB drivers will load properly, and I can't run Ghost32 from safe mode for some stupid reason.
2. The Dell recovery partition won't boot, it bluescreens with a STOP 0x0000007B error. Thanks, Dell, muthafuckas.

I finally found a solution to both 1 and 2, which was to:

1. Beg / Borrow a Dell Vista Home Premium OEM DVD (matching the OS key for the machine)
2. Boot from said DVD, go to Repair Options, and open a command window.
3. Swap the DVD for Hiren's Boot CD
4. Launch Ghost32 off of the boot CD. Presto! I can now image to my USB disk, no messing around required.
5. Wipe the OS and reinstall Vista.