Bootable Vista DVD

[pyrofyr]

I've been having problems making a bootable copy of Vista. It will boot on a PC that has Vista installed (Seemingly like a Recovery CD), but it will not boot on the system that I just built. I've verified that other DVD/CDs boot just fine as I have a copy of XPx32 that I made yesterday (With ImgBurn) as well, there.

 

Here's a log showing that ImgBurn says that the disc is Bootable, yet it's not...

I've read the guide, and I've tried extracting the boot remaking it etc.

 

I got the .ISO from MSDNAA (Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance), so it's a legal copy, and should work without a problem. I've burnt bootable copies with Vista, so I'm sure that the problem is just this specific ISO/DVD. I've seen lots of known problems with this, but no real fix for it, I've been searching all day long...

 

I 00:48:10 ImgBurn Version 2.4.2.0 started!

I 00:48:10 Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (6.0, Build 6001 : Service Pack 1)

I 00:48:10 Total Physical Memory: 3,142,904 KB - Available: 1,678,744 KB

I 00:48:12 Initialising SPTI...

I 00:48:12 Searching for SCSI / ATAPI devices...

I 00:48:15 Found 1 DVD

[LIGHTNING UK!]

If you have an ISO then that's an image file, as such you use Write mode.

[pyrofyr]

I was only re-building it to check.

 

I used Write mode, it won't write it as Bootable, even though ImgBurn says it's Bootable, and I got the file straight from Microsoft (MSDNAA), so it should be fine @_@;

[LIGHTNING UK!]

If ImgBurn says it's bootable then it's bootable.

 

I don't do anything special to make a disc bootable, it just doesn't work like that.

 

The El Torito descriptors are either in the image or they're not. It's down to your machine to actually read that info from the disc when the machine is rebooted.

 

Try finding an updated bios for your motherboard or something.

 

I assume you've checked your image is ok via the MD5 hash value?

[pyrofyr]

I would do that through Verify, correct?

As for my ISO, I wasn't provided with an md5sum through MSDNAA. I'm considering downloading it from elsewhere, but I don't want to go through normal pirating means to get this working, and hell since it says it's bootable, I'm even more confused by it, and why it won't boot...

[LIGHTNING UK!]

If you have the original image file name you can probably just google that along with 'md5' and I bet you'll get a hit.

 

For MD5'ing files I use a tool called HashTab. It's free.

[pyrofyr]

Okay, hashes are the same (checked in winmd5sum), so the problem isn't there.

 

This is still just not making sense to me, I don't see why a problem would or should come into place when WinXP works fine, and ImgBurn says it's bootable.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

Burn + verify the (now confirmed 'ok') image using Write mode.

 

If it all checks out ok then you know it's 100% readable in your drive and the only thing stopping it from booting is the machine (motherboard/bios/whatever) itself.