Asus Recovery Partition Gone & DVD Won't Work

Hello Everyone -

First time poster here. I have been a fan of Asus motherboards for years, and finally picked up a F7Kr for myself. I have been loving the laptop so far, but I am having a problem that I wanted to post up here.

First, I installed ubuntu a few days ago. I would use it full time with Wine, but there are still some power management issues going on that need to be addressed (and thats a whole 'nother discussion). To make a long story short, I installed it over the 6GB recovery partition at the beginning of the drive. This worked fine, and both Vista and Ubuntu functioned happily together.

I decided that Vista was feeling a bit bloated, so I wanted to reinstall it. I also decided that I wanted to use vLite to shrink the image down, save some space, and cut out some of the bloat (if you have never seen vlite, check it out at: http://www.vlite.net/). Well, I had major issues trying to use vlite with the recovery DVD as it doesn't contain a typical installer (From what I could tell). So, after having the installer blow my vista partition, I decided it would be smart to just do a recovery.

Here is where things get interesting. I boot off the recovery CD and then it gives me the option to Reinstall on the first partition, Reinstall over whole drive, or to reinstall into 2 partitions. I chose the option to reinstall onto the first partition. And thats where the system then crashes with a giant red ERROR on my screen. I really don't want to choose the other options, because I have a working copy of Linux on there, and if the recovery CD doesn't work, I am really going to be shooting myself in the foot.

So, here are my questions for everyone.

#1 - While I would rather avoid it, would it be possible to get another version of Vista Home Premium with a normall installer DVD, and then use my OEM key?

#2 - Is there any chance in hell that Asus will let me downgrade to XP and trade in my Vista license for it? If they won't let me do that, does anyone know if I can use an OEM Bios from another Asus laptop (I realize this may be a grey area).

#3 - If they won't do that, is there any chance they will give me a *real* vista CD? (I doubt this)


Any help would be appreciated. Thanks guys!

 

Unfortunately, I've never heard of this being done. At most, Asus would be willing to send you another copy of the recovery discs, and that might be for a fee.

You can ask, but I highly doubt that they'll let you trade-in for a downgrade. I'm not sure what you mean by an OEM Bios, but I wouldn't suggest putting the BIOS from another computer on yours. If you mean an OEM OS, then maybe it's worth a try, but in general, OEM OS discs are tied to a certain model/serial number.

No way sorry

What I suggest it that you clone your Linux partition or copy any important files, allow the recovery disk to recover to the entire hard drive and once you have Vista set up as you'd like, reinstall/transfer the Linux partition so you have things as they were. I know it's not ideal, but it sounds like that's the closest you're gonna get to the configuration you want.

~ Brett