Someone donated a G50V laptop to our church. Apparently it came factory loaded with Vista 64. The previous owner upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate at some point. He doesn't remember how he did it and doesn't have any CDs that contain the upgraded OS. Of the ASUS CDs that came with laptop, there isn't a recovery CD.
We are having issues with the laptop that suggest that the OS is corrupted and needs to be reloaded (several applications freeze or crash, all applications have been uninstalled and reinstalled multiple times). I had hoped to be able to use the recovery partition to reload the machine, but when I use the F9 key at startup, I only get the Windows Boot Manager that allows me the option to boot using Windows 7 or press F8 for advanced options. When I view Disk 0 using the Computer Management panel, I see that the recovery partition (RECOVERY E:, almost 12GB, FAT32) is there and the rest of the disk (Vista64 C:, 286GB, NTSF) holds the OS.
I've read from other forums that the recovery partition could be corrupted. What are my options at this point for reloading this machine? I have the ability to wipe the machine out and install XP. but I'd like to keep Windows 7 if at all possible. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
