Hi
Is it possible to create a bootable windows disk from the installed vista os on the drive?

My computer does not come with disks.

Bootable floppy is possible with Xp but not Vista as far as I know.

What you could do is the clone the system to anther hard disk as a back up. Just make sure one Vista never see another copy of itself in any boot-up it will destroy the boot loader of any duplicate copy.

I have a bit of a problem.

I just bought a new IBM Lenovo w500

I want to dual partition with linux.

The problem is that the computer comes with three partitions. The main C: drive is on the second partition.

I deleted the first and last partitions, moved the middle C partition to the first position and shrank it a little.

After that it would no longer boot.

Since I do not have a windows disk I was neither able to repair the windows C: parition nor reinstall windows on a new partition.

I have a lousy rescue disk. I repartitioned the drive so that only a part of the drive is ntfs and a few ext3 partitions. Since windows does not recognize ext3, I figured that when I used the rescue disk to reinstall windows, that it would only use the ntfs partition and ignore the rest of the harddrive. That is not the case. When I used the rescue disk it overwrote the entire disk and reestablished the three original partitions. Then I was back to step one again. Grrrrrr

I used windows backup to backup the entire C: partition. I thought maybe that would work. Nope . I wanted to be able to copy a backup of windows on a usb drive an put it on the new partition. However, I could not open the backed up files unless I had a working windows on the computer. Since I moved everything, it quit working.

I can try cloning. My question is will cloning the windows files and setting up a new partition work?
I can try cloning the drive using a live cd. I want to make the partition smaller then the original partition.

Any other suggestions?

I don't know if your Xp is operational or not.

You can move Xp to anther partition position but you must edit the hidden file boot.ini (you can use Live Linux CD to do it) to update its new partition number. Xp must be booted to its installed drive letter which is "C" in your case. The partition number when you got the laptop would be partition (2) and now in partition (1), according to your description.

You can restore Xp's MBR by using any Win2k or XP installation CD. A Dos floppy also work for Xp with command "fdisk /mbr". For Xp the command is in the Recovery Console
This will put a XP compatible MBR into the first 512 bytes of your laptop hard disk. If the Xp partition is healthy it will boot as long as your Xp partition has been marked "bootable". You can use any Linux Live CD terminal command fdisk, fdisk, sfdisk, grub, parted, gparted, etc to make sda1 or the "C" drive bootable. Xp's MBR will search any one of the 4 primary partition locations and boot the one that has the bootable flag set "on".

If you use third party software to copy and restore Xp it may not work because there could be immovable files inside. Cloning is the safest way as the files relative positions are retained.

It may be possible for you to put in any xp installation CD, install it and use the product key at the back of the laptop but I can't vouch for it. The drivers would have been in the first partition that you have deleted. That is a bad move because the driver partition is very small and its space is insignificant. The better alternative is the clone the entire disk to a bigger one, say 500Gb and you cam install another 10 to 15 OSes this way.

If everything fails you can get talk to another IBM Lenovo w500 laptop user, get a copy of his/her driver partition and re-install your Xp again.

Thanks for the info.

This is day 3 working on this stupid issue.

BTW the os is vista.

I used the restore disks again! Ten disks. To restore the entire system.

I am in the process of using clonezilla to backup the three partitions.
The last partition can be deleted because I just found out that they are used for a one time shot to create the recovery disks. It kind of makes me mad because it will only allow you to do it one time. I wanted to burn it on dvds but there is a warning about a boot issue so I used cd's. I later learned that you could use a cd for the first disk and dvds for the rest. .

I am not sure how to hack the system to allow additional burns.

And yes, the first partition is required. However, I think it has windows restore files rather than drivers. The partition is called "restore".

One thing I am not sure about is if grub or lilo will be able to boot windows once linux is installed. I am not sure if the mbr is still at the beginning of the disk and which partition is actually booted.

Any suggestions?

Sorry I misunderstood the OS was Xp.

To repair Vista you can follow the Task B7 of the last link (Just booting tips) in my signature. You basically get any Vista/Win7 installation DVD to boot up the system and use its Command Prompt (equivalent to the Recovery Console of Xp) and the commands bootrec.exe (bcdedit.exe can also be used too) to repair the MBR or the boot sector as needed.

If the Vista has been installed and boot successfully before it can be booted by other boot loader with the need of the MBR. You can fire it up now manually any time using a selected Linux Live CD. The procedure is here.

You can still download from the Internet a Win7 iso image and burn it into a DVD as a tool for fixing Vista. That is what I use mostly. Either 32-bit or 64-bit version will do. Try to get one from BTjunki for example.

I suggest you first try to boot Vista with a Live CD that gives you a Grub prompt. If that doesn't work you then repair both the boot sector and the MBR. Once the MBR has been repair Vista should boot automatically unaided.

The MBR is a separate and special area of its own. It is not part of any partition. Vista's MBR (or any MS Windows or Dos MBR) only does one thing. It searches the 4 primary partitions and boot wherever one has been marked "bootable" or "active". Since Linux never uses this flag so your Vista partition should still be marked bootable unless you failed to move it correctly from 2nd to 1st partition position.

I got things working.

I used the windows program to shrink the windows partition.
Rt click computer>manage>disk(or something like that)
Shrink partition

I then installed ubuntu for a first. I thought I would give it a try after having used slackware for the last 2-3 years.

Thanks