Ok, so i was a dumbass and decided to do a system recovery. i backed it all up, saved important files to an external disk, and did the recovery. After the recovery, it restarted a couple of times as software was being installed, then it hung for 1 hour. I manually shut it down, and upon restart, i get an error that says "windows cannot complete the installation. to install windows on this pc, please reinstall". I tried running recovery again, but it wouldn't run, until the 5th try. Now, it is in the middle of a recovery. Here are questions i would like to have answered. i will post back if it boots properly.

1. Why the f*ck won't it boot after a recovery with the provided disks!!

2. What is this error message, first time i've ever seen it.

3. I got the vista product key via jelleybean something program. if the recovery fails, can i use a vista install disk to reinstall vista and use the notebook's product key? again, that's the laptop's original product key, not the one on the vista disk.

4. If none of it works, should i replace the hard drive or take it to best buy to check it out?

could be a bad hard drive ,why did you decide to do a recovery ,were you having problems