Vista Hardships...

Well, just a quick follow up on my progress with the demon infested Dell XPS 420 I have been working on.  The Vista Recovery CD I found (from a mirror from NeoSmart's solution which is now offline) didn't work.  In fact, it broke the Vista boot altogether.  Using instructions to try and diagnose/repair the BCD store on the hard drive, the Vista partition was completely hidden from booting.  Fortunately, I made a backup copy of the BCD file that I restored using an Ubuntu Live CD (since now the Vista Recovery Disk wouldn't see the parition).

In an act of desperation I managed to find the Dell Recovery Image (Factory.wim) on the recovery partition once I got the BCD issue straight, and I copied it to an external hard drive.  Now to find a solution that will allow me to restore the .wim file without the official restore disk.

So without delay, it's time to do some research.