Okay, so here is the deal. I have a Gateway m6821, installed with Vista SP1. I was doing factory setting restore because I wanted to clear up some space and everything else i did didn't seem to have much of an effect. That being besides the point..when i was doing the factory setting restore, the stupid battery died. I thought it was full, but i was mistaken. When i plugged it in and turned the computer back on it couldn't find an operating system. I don't have any disks with the computer. But i don't mind ordering them. So if you could fill me in as to what disks i need that'd be great. like..vista disk, recovery partition disk? idk. anyway, i'd love a response.



Oh yea, one more important thing which was very stupid on my part. I used to have a gateway desktop that ran XP. i had a recovery disk with it. I decided hey, even though this is Vista, maybe this disk will work..what harm could it do since the computer is already kinda broken..well, now when i turn on the computer it starts to load the recovery partition or something, anyway long story kinda short, but still long..it now goes to a BSOD after. i don't know if i'll still be able to install the software needed to restore my baby or not...i'd really rather not get a new computer...don't really have the money for that.

When performing an operation like that, you should ALWAYS have your computer plugged in, chances are, a full battery won't be enough.
You will need to go out and purchase a set of Vista o/s disks and reinstall everything.

Thank you for your help. one more question though, since i have to buy the OS disk anyway, would i be able to run Windows Vista SP2? I had SP1, just didn't know if it'd be compatible.

Yes, I would actually recommend running SP2, I don't know of the availability of Vista with SP2 already in it, but you can always upgrade

hey, so..turns out my dad was smart enough to load vista to a flash drive 4 gb. but...how in the world am i supposed to use it boot this computer up.

i loaded the stuff onto another flash drive just incase i mess up the original one trying to get it to work.

originally it was showing "no bootable partition in table"..but i looked up some stuff for this issue and i found i had to format the flash drive. so now when i load it onto the broken pc, it says,
"Starting...


Microsoft (R) Windows Millennium
(C)Copyright Microsoft Corp 1981-1999.

C:\>"
as if i had opened up CMD.exe with a working computer. the only difference is...is no matter what i type it says, "Bad command or file name"

so...now what? im super confused. I asked my dad, and he didn't know..he said that he thought it'd be smart to back up the files, but doesn't know how it'd actually work.