Question : Is there a way to use the recovery partition to reinstall the OS if the drive won't boot or put it on a new hard drive?

 I have a hard drive that will not boot that contains the windows vista recovery partition. Is there a way to use that to recover a drive that will not boot? I would love to completely reinstall the OS using that but don't know if it's possible if the drive won't boot. I can slave it in another machine if I need to using a USB converter. If not and I purchase a new hard drive (drive may be bad anyway) is there a way to use it to install on the new drive since the machine did not come with a disk only that.

Answer : Is there a way to use the recovery partition to reinstall the OS if the drive won't boot or put it on a new hard drive?

You could do the following:


Get Kubuntu CD http://www.kubuntu.org/getkubuntu
Start the system at Kubuntu Intsalation display, press the F6 button.
At he end of the command line add-- noapic
Then installed with minimal requirements

Let your exisitng partitions in place and create another one

After install at GRUB display you should see something like:

- Kubuntu
- Kubuntu Recovery Mode
- Windos XP
- Vista Recovery

Select Vista Recovery , then at Recovery mode, select the recovery option that
formats the system as it was before your problems.

Hope it works.