Slayer wrote:
awe, Now I gotta go change my underwear, I just *beep* myself laughing
And have you actually used it?
This is the thing that gets me, all users 'know' vista sucks and tell everyone else it does, even if they've never used it. Now I'll be transparent, I haven't used it myself either, but after watching it settle a year and listening to people who actually
have used it, I've come around to it.
Kmaster wrote:
I couldn't get rid of Vista so I just decided to make a partition and install XP and make a dualboot start. Everything was ok until the winxp installation wanted to reboot... now there's a very fancy message everytime i boot my computer.
Aw man, sorry to hear that. You NEVER install an older version of Windows on top of a newer version to make a dual boot. Each version of Windows can only know about versions prior to it - Vista knows about XP but XP doesn't know about Vista, and messes up the boot loader. I've seen a whole lab of computers here at uni get taken down and require reinstalling when someone tried to make a dual-boot with Win2000 on the existing XP installs. If you'd done them the other way around, you probably would have been fine... you can't really blame Vista for this.
Sucks to have a hidden recovery partition on the harddrive rather than a proper install disc. I hate it when they do that.
Any chance you can you yank the harddrive out of new computer and attach it to your other functioning one? You should be able to read the data and copy it off that way, then you can safely reformat the drive to reinstall XP or Vista from the recovery partition. If it's a brand-new computer, I'm betting it's a SATA harddrive which your other one might not have the interface for, but you can buy a SATA expansion card to install in a PCI slot to get the required ports.
Hmm... or likewise you could install another harddrive in the new computer in place of the existing one and do a fresh install of XP on that, then attach the drive you want to get data from and copy it safely again?
Or, if you can still boot from your optical drive, maybe you can try one of the Linux OSes that run just of DVD. If it can read your drive (I think they can generally see the drive contents but not modify it) you might be able to make a copy onto some other media that way?
Or beg, borrow or steal (not really) a Vista install DVD so you can attempt to repair the installation to get it to boot again...