http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971... How does Vista, which is not going to be mounted, have any clue if you cloned it or not? Isn't the MBR and everything cloned? Even more so, I haven't even done anything to this new HP I bought. It has the main partition and the recovery partition. I heard someone on another site talking about how HP also had a Tattoo or something, is that a special hardware DRM for HP computers? Regardless I cannot install Vista SP2 on this brand new HP computer I spent a whole lot of money for. Did Microsoft design it so you couldn't, you know, actually BACK UP your install in case something happened to it, or is this just a bug on their part? This is absolutely infuriating, a service pack should not be this difficult. This probably will not work as it most likely references specific hardware components but could I find system files for a Vista x64 SP2 and copy them over and then run the SP2 installer or would that just royally botch things? Oh, and here is another article: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Vist... 111761.shtml Seriously, this is absurd. Did Microsoft make it so you couldn't have PARTITIONS? Dear lord, is this some scheme to keep people from copying Vista or using any other operating system or god forbid a DATA partition? Does any of this have to do with GPT? I really have only heard about it today but I guess it is the replacement for the (well-aged; only four primary partitions, come on?!) MBR. Microsoft basically says "screw you, reinstall Vista" in that article. This is absolutely unacceptable.

I found a fix that worked for me off of another site. Type mmc in the DOS command prompt. Load the computer management snap-in. Then do go to storage > disk management. Right click on the C: drive and mark the partition as active. Note: this worked for me but my rant still stands as the partition and cloning thing still affects a lot of people and it is still absurd.

DOS command prompt should state NT Command Prompt CMD.EXE, no DOS in Vista

Yeah, CMD.exe. Just a stripped down version of DOS as far as I am aware however.