My friend's Sony laptop won't boot Vista anymore.

He doesn't have a recovery disk, he hasn't got any disks at all. He was told to restore his Vista from hdd's recovery partition, he tried that and failed. I gave him Ubuntu live cd to retrieve his data to external hard drive which he has done.

I believe that if I use my Vista Premium 64 bit Oem dvd, I should be able to reinstall his Vista (I would assume 32bit Premium) as he has a cd key sticker at the bottom of his laptop.

What are your thoughts on that? Can you see any problems?

Yeah, that should work.

If not, you could try torrenting a copy of Vista (unaltered obv.) and using your CD key. I believe this isn't illegal, as you pay mostly for the License when you buy a copy of Windows.

I've torrented versions of Windows countless times when I've had CD Key stickers on the PC. For example, when my laptop went doolally, the recovery discs were unusable, so I just torrented XP Home and used my CD key.

Anyway, hope this helps you!

Unfortunately, the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are on separate discs, so you can't just mix and match.

Peter.

IIRC Preter is right, as 32bit and 64bit are classes as completely seperate OS' his Licence Key won't work with your OEM disk.

Torrenting a copy is probably the next best thing, obviously be careful with downloading the correct/safest one.

Torrenting the actual disk is illegal (as you don't have a licence to distribute the media).
If you ask Sony for disks they have to provide them.

Definitely. I know you have a licence key, but that does not give you any rights to downloading copyrighted software from torrents.

Peter.

Hmm, not what I wanted to hear about 32 vs 64 bit...

What if I got this instead:
Microsoft Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 (x86)
Exact UNTOUCHED ISO image that Technet/MSDN Subscribers have access to!

That should work right? I have found all drivers and apps on Sony website, no OS though...

I would imagine, unfortunately, that you don't have permissions to do this since you are not a Technet or MSDN subscriber.

Peter.

MSDN & Technet iso's are full retail and need activating, your oem key will not work.

Thing is though, it's still illegal even if it would work as whilst downloading a torrent, you're uploading it and so, sharing it with people who may not have the licence. That's the way I see it anyway.

All of that is rather irrelevant though because as Saspro says, you're looking for OEM and not retail. An OEM licence cannot activate a retail copy.

IIRC, Sony charge a small fee for replacement media (something like £30 but I'm really not sure).

Seems like information got lost somewhere and we don't understand each other so I would like to summarise:
I intended to use my 64bit vista cd to install vista and activate it using my friend's legit cd-key on my friend's laptop. Peter said that I can't use 64bit version cd to install 32bit so I suggested getting technet 32bit cd with legit cd-key from the sticker on the laptop. Some of you said it would work, some said it wouldn't so I decided to try it out.

So I installed Vista using technet cd, got on the line to Microsoft, went through the activation process and Vista is now successfully activated. So nothing has been stolen, it is not a cracked version, nobody is missing out. Maybe Sony is disappointed that it didn't get money second time around for the thing that has already been paid for (or maybe they would have sent it for free, it doesn't realy matter)

Had the activation not been successful, I would have installed Windows 7 RC. This way he would have the laptop that he could use in while waiting for Sony to ship the recovery disk.

I would also like to mention that my friend went to Pc World and was told by some idiot to buy a new operating system. There is plenty of people that would have done just that...

Not good - most non-tech savvy people would've just handed their money over to PCnoobs.

Anyway, I disagree that you haven't done anything wrong because whilst downloading the torrent, you also did some uploading and so, shared the torrent with people who may not have a licence for said operating system.

I have never claimed that I haven't done anything wrong and neither I have claimed that Vista was torrented. All I claim is that there was no harm done to anybody. I have proved it can be done without having an original disk and hopefuly we all learned something new regarding the use of Technet software...

I guess you could say no harm was done......

Anyway, you fixed it and that's the main thing.