Problem booting into Vista (dual boot with Debian lenny)
 

I figure I'll try my question here before Lenovo tech support, since I've heard many horror stories about it...

Anyway, I have a Lenovo thinkpad t400 which by default came with Vista. Long story short I got the Vista partition downsized and put Debian Lenny on the other partition. Well in the process, the "recovery partition" that lenovo put there was nuked by something I did (don't know why they can't just give me a disk instead of wasting my hard drive space). My setup worked just fine for a while, but I'm a learning linux enthusiast and like to play with partitions/MBR and other fun risky stuff...

Well one day I wake up and try to boot Vista, and I get a "winload.exe corrupt or missing". Not sure exactly what I did, but I think it might have had something to do with grub. So I reboot into Lenny (which boots just fine) and mount the Vista partition in bash and try to copy the "winload.exe" from the boot folder into the System32 folder, but lo and behold, the partition is read only.

So then, I download and burn a Vista recovery disk and try the repair that way. Only It seemed to have made it worse, since now instead of "winload.exe missing" I get a blue screen of death.

I guess it's not the end of the world if I have to reinstall, but I know I'm going to install XP over Vista if I can't repair it...

I think if you download a Win7 installation DVD, which is free from M$, you can use it to repair Vista. There are plenty versions downloadable from the Internet too. Win7 and Vista share the same boot loader bootmgr. Just boot up the disk and click "repiar". That is all you need.

Win7/Vista also has a command prompt, same idea of the Recovery Console of Win2k and Xp, that you can repair the system manually using bootsect, bootrec, BCDedit etc.

If you do put Xp in it its NTLDR can't boot Vista. bootmgr is the one that fires up Vista. There is no escape from learning bootmgr.= if you plan to use Vista/Win7 in future.

Vista/Win7 boots exactly like a Dos, Win9x, Win2k or Xp. Nothing has changed.