Factory Media Center with upgrade to Vista

[glenglenn]

Hi Guys,

I have a Gateway GT5220 in the shop that came with factory OS of XP Media Center. Customer either at that time or later got the Gateway upgrade to Vista Home Premium. Customer wants to have pc completely cleaned.

Question: Can you kick off a factory recovery from the original recovery partition to Media Center, or has Vista altered the boot sector and user partition to such an extent that you can no longer go back to Media Center? My plan was to recover back to factory Media Center and then do the upgrade to Vista (which the customer has that disk and key). Right now, I was assuming I could press the F11 (or?) key to kick off the factory recovery at bootup, and I am not having any luck. Gateway has of course not supplied any disks other than the hard drive. I tried from the context of the Vista OS to also launch a recovery but remarkably I am informed that only an administrator can start it from the OS, even though the account is the only account the customer is using and is in fact an administrator account.

I know that if you perform an upgrade to Vista in a standard hard drive where XP was installed on the full size of the drive that you can't normally go back to XP except that some XP files were kept in a special folder, but in this case, the Vista upgrade should not have altered the original recovery partition. Anyone have any experience with this?

Also, why do I run into so many Vista pc's where System Restore has not been creating Restore Checkpoints by default or is it just me? I seem to run into them where there is no history of restore points.

[xpuser357]

Is your vista disk a upgrade?? If it is full disk I would wipe and install.

[glenglenn]

Yeah, I wish it was full, but alas, it is upgrade. It used to be with XP that you only had to present the OS disk of a qualifying OS such as 98SE, and you could proceed with full install even with upgrade disk, but I don't know if this is possible with a Vista upgrade, and I have never seen a Media Center install disk (except I think one Dell I saw had one, but proprietary to Dell), usually just hidden partition, but I can't kick it off. I read about a patch for Gateway that removes the F11 message, but thought that you could still launch the recovery, but I've not been able to. If I wipe, I may lose the foundation required for the upgrade.

[glenglenn]

Well, the customer found his disk for Media Center, AND, I figured out how to kick off the factory recovery (for some reason, the "press 'R' was not showing up in my first attempts, even with proper monitor warmup, and also I was assuming it was "F11"). I don't know just yet how it's going to go, the customer wants to stay with Media Center, so I'm trying to do a recovery from the recovery partition, and not sure how it's going to go "undoing" the Vista upgrade.

[slgrieb]

Clean installation is always an option with any Vista Upgrade Edition. Some upgrades, in fact, require it. Here's a matrix of upgrade paths.

Just like the default in XP, System Restore in Vista is normally on. I can't imagine why you'd see many machines with it disabled unless the user had disabled it.

Edit: I had just done this post when I got to thinking that you might be totally lost about the Vista installation process. You do know don't you, that you can re-run the setup by booting from the DVD and wiping the drive or making partition changes, etc. from there, don't you? It's counterproductive to format it first.