KenF said:
The EULA said you could make one copy of installation media for backup
purposes.
I tired to do this on my XPP system using Nero 6 that came with my Sony
burner a year or two ago. Twenty min into the copy process it errored out
stating "illegal disk".
Is the original disc (This was the OEM Vista Home Premium version) copy
protected? Has anyone been successful in making a backup copy?
I've never had an OEM Vista disk and never used Nero 6 with a Vista disk of
any flavor so I can't directly address that issue, but when working with the
original beta program and with RTM volume license media I found that the old
Roxio mastering software shipped with Dell XP systems (OEM version 5) didn't
completely understand the Vista disk structure. (Roxio didn't error out on
a disk copy operation; it just didn't copy much of the contents and so
generated a coaster. The tipoff was an extremely short time before it
announced "copy complete.")
The workaround - which might work in your case - was to use the Roxio app to
read the disk into a .ISO file, then burn that to a blank DVD.
One of our HD staff reports that the current version of Nero has no problems
with this, and successfully creates a copy when told to do so.
One other item about burning a copy of the Vista setup disk: do it at the
slowest speed your mastering software offers. One problem that I
encountered (and saw several postings from other users with the same
problem) was installation failures with obscure and misleading error
messages, typically at or near the 15% point in the file copy phase. I
never saw an official explanation for it, but my suspicion is that the error
recovery code in the WinPE setup kit isn't robust enough to recover from
errors in the UDF structure. Taking the disk which failed to complete the
setup process, duplicating it as described above but burning at 2X instead
of 4X produced a reliable disk.
Joe Morris
