Laptop Recovery Disk is Not Working.

[watdahel]

I am trying to troubleshoot a HP Pavilion dv2000 series laptop running Vista. It was running fine but I suggested to the customer to overhaul it since another computer in his network was infected with a virus. I do not believe the laptop was affected. The customer gave me supposedly a Recovery Disk that he burned onto a CD-R. According to HP website there should be several disks. The CD the customer gave me is about ~200 MB and contains these folders and files: BOOT, HP, preload, SOURCES, Tools, AUTOMODE, BLOCK.RIN, boo.mgr, bootmgr, Folder.htt, HPCD.sys, MASTER.LOG, MediaID.bin, protect.ed. Can anyone with a HP Recovery disk confirm that this is a recovery disk? It seems rather small considering it's a Vista system.

I inserted the CD and restarted the laptop. The HP Recovery Manager runs off the CD and I proceeded to do a complete System Recovery. However, after the formatting procedure a window pops up with Error 1002. I repeated several times with the same results. I restart the laptop and I see only a blinking cursor and on other instances I saw Missing BootMGR message. Pressing F11 Key to initiate the HP Recovery Manager from harddisk no longer works.

To checkout the partition on the harddisk I used my Windows XP installation disk and see that there are 2 NTFS partition and one unpartitioned space. The C: partition is 24 GB and the other is 6 GB which I believe is the recovery partition but I am not positive. The unpartitioned space is 120 GB! How could that be?
I also ran a liveCD of linux and I could only see the 24 GB partition and not the 6 GB partition. I don't understand the odd partition setup.

Right now I'm chatting with HP support to get them to give me the Recovery Disk for free.

Someone please help me get this thing running. Can I download the recovery disk someplace or sprinkle pixie dust on the keyboard or something?

 

[corkyg]

That does not look like the Recovery Disk for the OS. HP also provided disks for drivers and for applications. The Recovery Disk has a SETUP.EXE file and several Windows folders.

I don't have the dv2000, but the dv1000 - and am speaking in parallel terms.

Recent laptops have the recover software in a special partition that can be copied to bootable media. The recovery partition is usually an unmounted one. It is normally accessed through the HP utilities that are in the embedded programs. That would be the F11 key you mentioned.

HP support is a solution. Have you tried this?

HP

 

[SSWilson]

The HP I recently received came with a recovery partition and the ability to burn restore disks. The restore disks consumed 3 DVD's and the program said if I were to use CD's then it would take 20. :Q

I tried the F11 option for giggles and it didn't work but the DVD's do work.

 

[watdahel]

After spending last night and pretty much the whole day today I've come to the conclusion that the recovery partition and CD are junk. I went ahead and ordered the recovery discs from HP. I tried to persuade the chat tech support to give it to me for free but he wouldn't budge.

When you say the recovery partition is unmounted that means I shouldn't be able to see it in Windows? In my case I do see a D:\ partition but doesn't appear to contain the recovery data. And then there's the 120 GB of unpartitioned space. I'm guessing someone else fooled around with this laptop and deleted stuff. I'll ask the customer the history of the laptop.

 

[corkyg]

Yes - the unmounted drive does not show in Windows unless you run a program like PerfectDisk. Many users consider such things provided by the OEM as "bloatware" and deliberately dump them. That's OK provided you prepare the Rescue disks first.