I just bought a refurbished Gateway laptop. It came with no disks of any kind so I assumed Vista was already installed. When I turned it on for the first time the Vista installation started but hadn't made it to the part where I put in the cd key and I closed the lid because it was going slow. I opened it again and it appeared that nothing was happening there was just the background so I restarted it and got the error message computer restarted unexpectedly.....click ok to restart. This comes up every time. I also tried booting with a recovery cd and was able to get to the installation screen again and put in the product key from a sticker on the bottom of my computer. It said the key was wrong (which is probably a separate issue) so I try to proceed without it which is allowed except that I get the message Unable to locate e:\sources\install.wim.....error code 0x80070002. The weird part is that e is the cd drive and all of the vista files are on the hard drive. I've tried a few other things, but for nothing. I can get into the command prompt and have just downloaded a program called ultimate boot disk which will allow me to view the files on the hard drive without the inconvenience of the dos prompt. I ran chkdsk and also a memory test and they checked out. I'm out of ideas now and waiting until tomorrow to get some blank cds for the boot program I downloaded or possibly some free os that will let me just check the files. Can anyone help me out? Thanks.
Well either nobody wants to help me or nobody knows what to do, but I'm gonna update this anyway because I have a new problem. I decided to forget about installing Vista and just installed Xp which works fine except that its missing some essential drivers which Windows could not locate, and I also could not locate. I also tried installing Vista again but it gives the same error I mentioned in the first post. Now it seems unlikely that my computer would come without all of its drivers. So I need help either finding the drivers or installing Vista. Again, it's a Gateway computer m-7137u (or a similar combination of numbers) and the motherboard and all that is Intel. Thanks again.
