A quick google search yielded the solution. So using the vista CD i booted in to restore mode and attempted to reconfigure the boot record, only to be presente with the message “element not found”. This caused the error msg Cannot find operating system. My mistake was not to reconfigure the active primary partition. Seeing as the OS was different to that of the recovery I agreed. I recently had an enquiry from a user, they wanted to reclaim a partition on their machine that was allocated to emergency recovery.
