[Shift General] silversurfer03:
xvista.wim image recreation process

Well, as the outcome of numerous trial&error attempts, and several sleepless days&nights, ultimatively restoring xvista.wim which I have managed to download from your kindly shared ftp, should be the optimal thing for me.

Mybackup acronis file from your ftp site seems to disconnect around 500MB and anyhow my hard disk on shift doesnt have all 40GB available for applying acronis method. HD has bad sectors which cannot be repaired, and S.M.A.R.T. at boot is showing message:

Bad and Capable. Replace.

Otherwise it is completely blank and erased, all together with recovery partition, which I made visible following instructions from Riki, but with no data on it. I even messed up (deleted all partition tables and mbr), but managed to restore as back to normal as possible with testdisk.exe and deeper search and other manipulation techniques found on respective threads around here :)

I managed to boot shift lately with Windows PE cd-rom, made form WAIK 2.0 and have some tools available like imagex.exe, but unfortunately cannot apply xvista.wim which i managed to copy from usb-flash disk directly to hd, the error says: "cannot apply xvista.wim - not appropriate image file" or smth alike.

So I am now at my last attempt to restore xvista.wim image, i.e. apply it on present hard disk, before I buy a new one. I would go and buy it in the first place, via amazon or buy.com, but just the custom regulations for the country i live in are very troublesome, and I cannot find it in retail PC hd shops anywhere, because it appears very small market for 1.8" hdisks. ANd anyhow I would require the technique of restoring vista shift installation from original hidden partition files.

What I did is:

1. have downloaded boot.wim, install.wim and X13-...executable file for preparing c:/Vista folder and eventually iso installation ready DVD with your xvista.wim and other recovery partition folder files and folders, downloaded from ur ftp.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/10/how-to-make-vista-bootable-dvd-with-wim-downloaded-files/

This was part of manual how to prepare bootable Vistadvd.iso image, however, made for standard regular Vista installation.

I reached the point where I have the files ready for making an image with oscdimage command line, i.e.:

oscdimg -bC:\Vista\boot\etfsboot.com -h -u2 -m -lVISTA_EN_DVD C:\Vista\ C:\VistaDVD.iso

however, I cannot figure out what to do with Your recovery partition folder items, i.e. boot.wim and xvista.wim and other, meaninng, where should I place them or should I replace some files already there in Vista standard installation set?

Namely, does xvista.wim just sits in the Vista folder root, or in some subfolders like 'sources' or 'boot'? Since Vista std iso is already some 2.5 GB, would shift-customized one with xvista.wim, iso-image amout to more than 5 GB?!!

At last, what my problem is, that I wasnt able to boot from Vista std installation iso dvd-rom made by the manual earlier mentioned, nor even start installation screen,though there is remote chance that dvd-rom wasnt burnt and verified properly. I seem to be ignorant for making USB key bootable sticks, i cannot activate the key in diskpart dos prompt ever!

I can boot from dos testdisk.exe and WindowsPE with some luck.

Thanks a lot if you had enough patience to read the history and help me out...