aaron R

I would suggest ordering replacement CD/DVD from HP. Then you can use the trick mentioned in this article to access all the features of that disk. One of them is to recreate the recovery partition if I recall correctly. To be honest, you’re probably better off installing Fedora 8 or Ubuntu or OpenSUSE. Linux is better and any investment you make in it will pay you back tenfold.

-David

I need some help with HP pavilion notebook.

Recently I had crashed my HDD with Ubuntu Linux installation. After alot of struggle with several SW, I’ve been able to restore Windows using an old image created with Norton Ghost.

However, I wish to restore my recovery partition which was erased. I had this partition cloned on a USB HDD but I don’t know how to restore it in a way it becomes bootable.

I tried to copy it to a primary FAT32 partiotion and set it active but it still won’t boot.

Is there a way to boot this partition so I can restore my computer to it’s original state?

Thanks in advance,
Barlev

lord o land o lifting.

format 25 gigs the hard way. 66% now. god will
it never end? well at least up to this point has
been painless. 74% seems all i do is wayt for stuff
to happyn. last 20% it seems to take forever. sigh.
watching numbers tick off. seems to be the shortcut
to instand self hypnosis.. as the mind starts grabbing
onto anything it can find to offset the boring mind
knumbing numbness of it all. at last 95%.. it’s almost
over i think. damn you bill gates and you devotion to
making us wait. shell a poker game in somehow someway..
painfull to watch thesesseseseses longer and longer
setups.
sitgh.
done.
=====

here we are again i think. 2:30am in the morning.. and i’m running the “hp pc system recovery” again. 20min of my life sigh. think it had a prob with the boot.ini etc. also ran bsupdater.. which popped off no prob .. so maybe.. just maybe i’ll be looking at a working copy of winxp hp style. god i hope it doesn’t get all picky about the boot image. sigh. gotta admit.. as a repair console this winpe.iso i found seems to fit the bill as in terms of its effectiveness. sigh. i just know this isn’t going to work in the end. sigh. i just know it. heh. but at least i got to watch a couple of neat progress bars go by. sigh.

hmm. i did notice that i ran the recovery proggie from the i386 folder, not the minint folder. prob will work out ok anyway. sigh hope it boots. sigh.

heh. here’s the next ’something’. after creating an logical partition in a extended unpartitioned space.. didn’t know i had to set the primary partition to be the active one. sigh. maybe this is why it didn’t boot. i did this time. cross fingers.. that it works maybe. shrug. i dunno. not like i’m doing anything illegal here. it’s a $100 computer what do you want?

oh wait. maybe i have to rehide the restore partition and swap somehow soas the logical drive becomes the boot drive. shake my head slowly at the outlook here. just don’t know if it will work or not. think it might not matter as if afore mentioned active partition thingy works out. and i did do the bootsectore restore as well. so maybe even the f10 thing might work. sigh if only. then maybe might be another 20min re restoring again!! sigh.

and it only dumps out 5gigs of software when it is done. what a gype. time is now 2:40 in the am. sigh. don’t seem to want to sleep much. guess i find this kinda stuff interesting. plus got cbc in the am christmas morning. so maybe a special time for me. like a power time or something. not quite sure .. what am i supposed to be feeling? am i happy? not really. just feel blocked migraine headachey. the ruff curled edges. grate against my sinuses. mostly on my right side of my face. like the world is pushing way to hard on me to succeed at what i will never understand or possibly comprehend. all i seem to stand for is ‘f”d over.
===
heh. almost killed me that time. had to boot into puppy linux just to set the flag on the hidden hp recovery partition. this time when the computer booted up.. the ntfs partition that i had just added as a primary, not logical.. sigh. 3 time is the charm.. and right off the bat i knew i had won. the recovery partition showed up as d:. which i knew i could hide later… but that gave me access to the recovery software yet again. and we are looking at just as long as the last time.. but at least now i had a receptive partition.. something that would hold the active boot load init.. straight from the first sector ala professional like. and i left me some 5 gig space for elive and maybe a mini puppy linux install dunno. see how i feel. maybe 4 and 1 gig’s apeice. hmmm. sounds right.

gosh this feels so good. like a baseball sinking into mitt. a satisfied knowing of a good catch.

it is officially 3:24am in the christmas am.

ok… 3:42am.. and i’m gonna reboot this monkey!!
wish me luck sigh…

===

heh, ok, guess what. on reboot got a code purple alert. what ever that was. ran (oh yes .. again) xp home setup and was able to repair the installed partition.

===
tips:
how to make the c:restore partition go back to d: (and later hide it). boot linux .. i used puppylinux. 2.15ced. fire up cfdisk /dev/hda.. change the type to 0×12 (compaq hidden partition).. reboot. heh. now that you can’t find it.. reboot linux. change it back to 0b (fat32) and reboot your winpe.iso.. voila! c: is now d:, and you are left with the secondary partition you created.

.. i don’t think there are any excessive copy protection in effect other than locating a winpe.iso to fire up the recovery prog software. oh and of course the dance around not being able to make a logical drive a bootable partition. also very much fun to set up using diskpart. sigh.

cross posted at:
groups.msn.com/cheapcomputer
‘kl8r/ra:)