[32] Reinstalling Vista

[burgert]

Due to video card problems I had to reinstall Vista (home premium). The installation went fine, but a major problem developed. I could not access drive D, a partition standard with new Dells. The partition contained the ghost of the system and all my program backup files. Spent over three hours with Dell's technical support (if you can call it that) and none of them could figure out why System Restore can not find the partition. I will send the computer back to Dell (it is only 30 days old), but really curious why the problem showed up after reloading Vista.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Philgo]

How did you re-install Visa, was it from a Visa disk or from a restore disk?

Has your C partition got bigger?

What do you see in Disk Management?

[burgert]

I used Dell's Vista DVD. The C partition did not change and I did not look at Disk Management. I believe that Dells support check it through Dell's connect and made no comment about it. I can not verify that, the computer is packed up and ready to go back to Dell. I just would like to find out what could cause this kind of problem, so this would not happen in my next PC. Might be a bug in Vista.

[Philgo]

Can't say for sure what happened especially has it's now boxed.

Do you really need to return it if, you have the Vista you can do what you want.

It's not a bug with Windows I'm pretty certain of that, when you installed Vista did you point it to the C partition?

[burgert]

I am returning the computer to Dell because of the extremely poor support, besides this problem I spent hours holding and than trying very hard to understand a support person. When reinstalling Vista, I did point to the C drive, the D partition remained intact, all my files were visible, could delete them, copy them, but Vista could not access the drive to do a restore.
My guess is that I named the computer to something other than when I did the initial backup, Dell disagreed.
Thanks for trying to help!

[burgert]

Just remembered, after reinstalling Vista, I had THREE Windows directory on the C partition named Windows_0, Windows_Old and Windows. The 0 and Old had my old program files. Was I supposed to copy them to the Windows directory? Most programs ran from the two extra directories. but not all. This is kind of unusual, but seems like lot's of things are in Vista. My question is, when you reinstall Vista, the previous backup is also reinstalled in another Windows directory? Is this why I couldn't access the backup?
Thanks for any comments.

[Steve R Jones]

You probably should have used the restore partition to return it to it's original state.

[burgert]

Steve,
That was my problem, Vista could not access the D (backup/restore) partition. Please read my original post.

[SuperSparks]

The Windows.old files are simply a copy of the old OS files in case you forgot to make a backup and there are files that you need (a very nice touch ). If there are no files that you need from it then you can safely delete it.