[glovers99]

Right here goes !!!!! i have been running windows vista on my laptop for the past 8 months with no problems.... recentley i did something really bad and compressed my hard drive and it would no longer boot.Sooooooooo after much searching on the net i found something about bootmgr fix through dos, which i did but that did not work . Someone suggested slaving the hard drive to another machine which i did and it uncompressed..WAHEY.....or so i thought . When i put it back in the laptop it said Bootmgr is compressed so i put the vista disk and ran the startup repair. this seemed to work for the first boot then on the second nothing happened it just would not boot so i put in the vista disc and an error message appeared, something along the lines of a hardware change has happened since the last boot and windows could not find the drivers. the hardware in question is the cd/dvd rewriter.......................so my problem is now how do i install vista on the harddrive when i can not get the disc to run in the drive???????

p.s i have formatted the hard drive so it is a clean install and RC1 of vista which i have will seem to run (have only tried it to see if it gets further than the real version)

Any help will be appreciated