joefuf

Thank you for your response. I think I am going to go with the results from here instead. Formatting my C drive is a bit invasive for me seeing as a large portion of my life revolves around it at the moment so I am going to use the disk that Sarah built. I already tested it once and It booted perfectly so once I knock out the issue of having it recognize the external HDD I will be set. Hope this helps anyone who was in the same situation as me at a later time!

So I will need a copy of WAIK? That I can get easily. Are you just saying that I need to get an early copy of UBCD4WIN and add certain XP drivers to my Vista laptop in order to make it run? yeah i had read that a few places, but thought since the topics had been written over a year earlier there had been some improvements made. Since that's not the case, I shouldn't be trying to use VistaPE?

SO over the summer, I backed up a copy of my Dell Vostro 1520 laptop (running Vista Home Premium) with DriveImage XML just to be on the safe side. After the past few months, I must have messed up some configurations with my laptop and I want that old copy back up and running. Didn't really think through the whole restore process, and when I try to restore the C drive, I get the error message that "Target drive may not be the system drive." which totally makes sense since you can't really expect the computer to run while formatting itself. After all my research - potentially running Windows 7 off an external HDD to restore my C drive, making a UBCD4Win disk only to realize that you cannot run an XP environment on a Vista laptop, and a few others - I read that I need to build up a VistaPE disk and put a DriveImage XML script into the mix, but as computer literate as I might be, this is just way beyond me. Can someone please direct me to a good thread or please give me a hand with building the disk? I already have a copy of the DriveImage XML script, a ZIP file of the DriveImage XML install and the newest version of WinBuilder. I have the backup files on my Seagate external HDD. At my disposal I have a 160GB HDD (just saying, for anyone who has a potential idea that could require it). I also have a copy of the Windows Vista SP1 ISO. Thank you very much!