Hey guys, I am new to this forum. This is my first post. Anyways, I
have a dvd drive (Hitachi that is detected in the bios and sometimes by
windows vista home premium) This is stock on my laptop, both the
operating system and the dvd drive. I have not ever added another os or
did a factory restore. I contacted my laptops brand (gateway) and they
told me a factory restore was needed before sending this machine back.
Things I have tried...

- System restore to an earlier point in time (don't have any to that
point)
- Deleting upper and lower bounds in the registry
- uninstalling the driver for the dvd drive, but it detects and
installs it upon reboot.
- driver is there and it is enabled so the dvd should work
- boot into safe mode and try burning (samething)
- boot into linux, works, the cd drive has no problems

It disappears randomly whether i am burning something or just looking
at a disk. The only way i can get it temporarily back is by Microsoft's
fix it tool. However, it disappears randomly other times.

Now my question is this. instead of doing a factory restore, can i just
put an external hard drive in and install vista os on the portable usb
hard drive. Once installed, can i copy my registry keys from one os to
another? If so, does anyone know where i could find these and which
keys they are? That way, i wont lose my settings and programs. if i
need to install a few programs because i need to delete a few things, so
be it. I just don't want to lose everything.

Thanks


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Cdeath