[mlwjackson]

My son's laptop has become so messed up with lost associations that I think the only solution is a repair installation or complete reinstall. Does anyone know if I can just do a repair installation from a Toshiba recovery disc? If I put his music and other stuff in a separate partition will future reinstallations of Vista to a C: partition delete things in the other partitions?

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What kind of Toshiba laptop is it? Tecra, Satellite,....?

and also what series? A200, M300, U300....?

Edited by UV_Power, 30 January 2008 - 12:55 AM.

[UV_Power]

What kind of Toshiba laptop is it? Tecra, Satellite,....?

and also what series? A200, M300, U300....?

Edited by UV_Power, 30 January 2008 - 12:55 AM.

[mlwjackson]

The laptop is a Satellite. The recovery disc is for Satellite A210/A215. It is a dual core Turion (?), 2GB RAM, 200GB HD.

[hfcg]

Hello, and welcome to Geeks To Go.
The first LAW of computing, Back up, Back up, Back up.
The best way to do this is to back up any Data that you do not wish to lose to a CD/DVD, Flash drive, or external hard drive.
You should be able to do a Repair installation, and save your Data.
It is still best to back up your Data. (I can not say this too many times).
If you choose to do a full restore you will have to reinstall your programs, so you may wish to try the Repair installation first.
Thank you.

[mlwjackson]

I am going to have to use the recovery disc on my sons Toshiba laptop. He has a lot of music on the HD. We have it backed up on an external drive. Before I use the recovery disc can I create a new partition just for his music and copy the music from its current location (C:) to the new partition and thereby avoid having to reload the music from the external drive following use of the recovery disk?

[UV_Power]

Personally, whenever I reformat, I like to backup everything onto an external medium and completely kill the whole thing and start fresh. If you use the backup utility on the recovery disc Toshiba gave you, it may back up some things that are prompting you to reformat anyways. But, that's just me.

Unless you are sure that it will not touch the other partitions, just backup everything you need and then try it out.

Worst case: You lose your data on the other partition during recovery, but you still have it backed-up somewhere else.

[hfcg]

I would try the non-distructive repair first.
You can always do a full recovery if the repair fails to fix the problem.
Just back up any Data first.
Thank you.