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Can you install the operating system onto a new hard drive with just the recovery disc, or in my case a memory stick?
£120 for a hard drive??? Is it gold plated?
Manufacturer rescue discs normally just squirt a factory image which is hidden away on your hard drive onto DVD/USB sticks. They don't copy settings or data, just set your equipment back to when you first got it out of the box.What you're talking about doing is cloning. I use Clonezilla for this and it takes an exact copy of the entire disc (not just the windows installation) and then puts that image on another hard disc. It's not particularly easy to use and there are pitfalls (you can't use a smaller sized physical disc) but I implemented it at work... and now windows re-installs take 10 minutes instead of the 2 hour rebuilds previously.£120 for a hard drive??? Is it gold plated?
You should make sure Vista has Service Pack 2 installed. Back up anything you wouldn't want to lose beforehand.... it doesn't happen very often but installing a Service Pack is a big thing, especially if you're computer is a bit unstable anyway.Main support (ie new features) has already ended for Vista, but as long as you have the latest SP installed you should continue to receive patch updates until 2017.Also that error code means something slightly different than it does with XP which is what you probably picked up with in Google if you didn't put Vista in front of the error code. The most common seems to be to do with Intel Rapid Storage and the restoring of factory disks to a new and bigger hard drive... sounds familiar!http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/itprovistadesktopui/thread/45c67633-0df1-483b-b387-2f4d980ff08cThere are several alternative fixes if it's not the Intel Rapid thing, including the automatic Microsoft one which does actually fix things (unlike most of Microsoft's wizards) :http://support.microsoft.com/mats/windows_update/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929833
Why people take their PCs to PC World to be repaired is beyond me. They are renown for ripping people off. £120 for a fitted hard drive is getting on for 3 times the cost it should be.