I have found a website that is hosting downloads of recovery discs for Vista and W7. If you have the installation disc for you OS, you don’t need these. If however, you are one of the many people who bought a new PC with the OS pre-installed and did not get an OS disc, these discs may prove invaluable in repairing your system without having to revert to the state the machine was in when it left the factory. They are NOT installation discs, they just give you the Recovery Console in a bootable format from which you may be able to repair your system.
The site is Windows Vista Recovery Disk and Repair Disc Download | The NeoSmart Files
The files they offer are torrents that have to be used in a bit torrent client such as uTorrent. I know, the dreaded P2P, but these are perfectly safe and a legal and legitimate use of the technology. If you really don’t want to use P2P, I will be trying to upload the actual disc ISO files to my online storage site. I will keep this topic updated if I’m successful in the uploading.
UPDATE: I have uploaded the ISO for 32 bit Vista. I tried it out on the Vista machine here and it boots up into the normal installation screen with the options to install or repair. You can NOT install with the disc so you have to click on repair. It seems to work from there but I didn’t run it completely since my Vista installation is fine. There are no guarantees that these discs will work but I think it’s worth a shot to try them before doing a full factory state recovery and losing everything on the HDD.
The link for the 32 bit Vista ISO:
32 bit Win7:
64 bit Win7: