I am away from home on business for several weeks and my Dell laptop developed a fault. I obvioulsy din't have my installation disc with me. I eventually resorted to trying to repair the Vista installation from the recovery partition (E:), but this failed when it tried to re-format the C: Now I have the problem that I can't access the PCrestore.exe file on the Recovery partition. I once used a much earlier version ( ver 2?) of UBC some tears ago with sucess, will I be able to repartition and reformat from the last version and gain access to the Recovery partition (E:)?

You can try to access and run the PCrestore.exe file from the FreeDos image.
You also can try one of the included bootloaders to boot the recovery partition.

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Download Ultimate Boot CD v5.0: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
Use Parted Magic for handling all partitioning task: http://partedmagic.com/

Sorry, just realised this was posted in the wrong place. But..........have downloaded UBCD4.1.1 and burned it. When i try to run any of the utilities I get an "Invalid Opcode at ................" with a 52 digit number.I tried to install FreeDos, as suggested, and got to the install point, then got a similar "Invalid Opcode..." response with a different location. I don't know what this signifies. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Some problems with Invalid Opcodes are solved in UBCD50RC1.

_________________
Download Ultimate Boot CD v5.0: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
Use Parted Magic for handling all partitioning task: http://partedmagic.com/