Copying Vista

[Guest]

Hello,

Please excuse me if this question has been answered before. I couldn't find
it.

I got the Vista: Business Edition through my college's academic alliance.
It's copied on 5 CDs instead of 1 DVD. If I use the discs I got from school
they work fine and will act as a boot disk. However, I'd like to make my own
copy in case I need to reinstall or have a problem in the future, especially
since I plan to pay for the upgrade to Ultimate. My problem is, I can't seem
to get my system to boot from a copy I've made. I've gotten the boot image
off the school's copy and tried to make disc 1 a bootable disc, I've even
tried combining all of them into one .iso image and burning them onto 1 DVD
to no avail. Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible for someone to walk
me through the process? Any help you can offer will be appreciated. I spent
almost 11 hours yesterday trying to get it to work.

Thanks!
-John

 

[pvdg42]

Hello,

Please excuse me if this question has been answered before. I couldn't
find
it.

I got the Vista: Business Edition through my college's academic alliance.
It's copied on 5 CDs instead of 1 DVD. If I use the discs I got from
school
they work fine and will act as a boot disk. However, I'd like to make my
own
copy in case I need to reinstall or have a problem in the future,
especially
since I plan to pay for the upgrade to Ultimate. My problem is, I can't
seem
to get my system to boot from a copy I've made. I've gotten the boot
image
off the school's copy and tried to make disc 1 a bootable disc, I've even
tried combining all of them into one .iso image and burning them onto 1
DVD
to no avail. Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible for someone to
walk
me through the process? Any help you can offer will be appreciated. I
spent
almost 11 hours yesterday trying to get it to work.

Thanks!
-John

You should have no difficulties booting from the copy you made if it's a
true copy. No special procedures needed. You need to use the "copy disc"
feature of your burning software, and I'd suggest using a slower burn speed,
like 16x. Normally slower speeds mean better quality. BTW, if the copy of
the first CD is bad, chances are that others are bad, too.
Tell us what software and technique you used to make the copies, if you want
more specific answers.

 

[Guest]

I mainly used ImgBurn and CDBurnerXP Pro 3. I don't have Nero or Roxio or
anything like that (I don't burn many discs). The error I was getting was
CODE:5 after the error message saying that the machine couldn't boot from the
CD. I've got an NEC DVDRW ND-3540A drive if that helps at all.

Thanks for the quick response!

 

[Vash The Stampede]

I mainly used ImgBurn and CDBurnerXP Pro 3. I don't have Nero or Roxio
or anything like that (I don't burn many discs). The error I was getting
was CODE:5 after the error message saying that the machine couldn't boot
from the CD. I've got an NEC DVDRW ND-3540A drive if that helps at all.

Thanks for the quick response!

Try making an .iso from the original DVD. I didn't notice where you said
you did this, so I'm assuming you didn't.

Then, burn the image to a new DVD. perhaps someone can tell you how to
span it across CDs, but my bet is it will start to install and then get
'lost', ie, it will not know how to pick up from the next CD.

If you have two drives, ie, a CD and a DVD, use a Live CD of Linux to make
an .iso, like Knoppix or Ubuntu. It's free, it works, and it doesn't limit
the size of the .iso to 385MB like the shareware things for Windows do.

Good luck...

Oh, the utility is K3B

 

[arachnid]

Hello,

Please excuse me if this question has been answered before. I couldn't
find it.

I got the Vista: Business Edition through my college's academic alliance.
It's copied on 5 CDs instead of 1 DVD. If I use the discs I got from
school they work fine and will act as a boot disk. However, I'd like to
make my own copy in case I need to reinstall or have a problem in the
future, especially since I plan to pay for the upgrade to Ultimate. My
problem is, I can't seem to get my system to boot from a copy I've made.
I've gotten the boot image off the school's copy and tried to make disc 1
a bootable disc, I've even tried combining all of them into one .iso image
and burning them onto 1 DVD to no avail. Am I doing something wrong? Is
it possible for someone to walk me through the process? Any help you can
offer will be appreciated. I spent almost 11 hours yesterday trying to
get it to work.

This sounds like you're copying the files but not the boot track. IMO
the most troublefree way to do exact DVD copies of nontrivial DVD's is
with CloneDVD:

http://www.slysoft.com/en/clonedvd.html

It's a commercial program but last I checked they had a 21-day free trial
that ought to do for now.

 

[Dale]

Welcome back. How're things on the home front?

Dale

 

[arachnid]

This sounds like you're copying the files but not the boot track. IMO the
most troublefree way to do exact DVD copies of nontrivial DVD's is with
CloneDVD:

Sorry. I didn't read that closely enough.

I still think the problem is that you're missing the boot info which will
be on the first CD. I'd start by trying to make exact copies of the CD's.
For that you'll want CloneCD from the same site:

http://www.slysoft.com/en/clonecd.html

It may be possible to combine the CD's into one DVD but there are some
potential complications. The first, though it's unlikely, is that the boot
track that works for the CD won't work for the DVD. The second is that the
setup program may expect the CD's and may even check to make sure each has
the correct label. The path of least resistance is just to make exact
copies of what you know works.

BTW I have no idea what the legalities are...

 

[Guest]

Thanks for all the help folks. CloneCD worked perfectly. I'm not sure what
the legalities are either, but we get our own activation codes, and I just
want the discs as a backup in case I need them in an emergency (and I'm
upgrading to Ultimate next payday and I'm assuming I'll need the discs to
unlock some of those features?). If Microsoft wants me to destroy them
though, I'll just pop them into the shredder.

Thanks again to everyone for their help!
-John

 

[arachnid]

Welcome back. How're things on the home front?

Still very busy but I just gotta get online now and then for my sanity!

 

[Guest]

Also, instead of extracting the DVD from the cd's(time consuming) you could
try to download "windows vista DVD.iso" on
ThePirateBay(http://thepiratebay.com). Use nero to write that to a dvd and
you have a *identical* windows vista dvd.

 

[Dale]

Yeah, that's what I would do. Why wait to install trojans and spyware until
after you install Windows when you can include it right in the Windows
install.


Dale