how to use hp winxp system recovery on formatted drive?

[daveymark]

I bought an hp system, formatted the drive, and now the system recovery disk gives me an error message that says "must be run on an hp machine"

I heard there's a hidden partition that stored all the data or something, is there any kind of workaround for this?

 

[ryejay98]

When you formatted the drive, its possible that you over wrote the hidden partition, which means you are screwed unless you have the CDs (which you have to pay for).

I believe you arent supposed to reformat when you want to "reformat" and reload everything. You should have started the HP recovery thing, and let that reformat your drives and reinstall.

This is why HP sucks, amongst other reasons