Recovery Partition

[jjsbasmt]

Family brings me an HP Desktop with Vista Home Premium 32 that won't boot due to damage from viruses and trojans. I've cleared off the nasties, but of course the owners never created backup recovery discs and the boot sector is crapped and pressing F11 during/after POST yields no results. The Recovery partition seems fine and has no files changed. I have ordered the replacement Recovery Discs that will be here in a week. But....... Is there a way I can boot the system and access the Recovery Partition to do a restore? Oh yes, by the way, this system has no floppy so booting from CD/USB device would be the options. Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[sivart]

I know on Dell machines if you go into the boot menu, booting from the recovery partition is an option. Maybe something similar for HP?

 

[jjsbasmt]

You are correct! The splash screen says to press F11 for Recovery, but when I do that the system still goes to a black screen with a flashing cursor, the same as if I try a normal boot up. I'm trying to figure out a way to boot the system and access the Recovery Partition to start the process. The C: partition is still on the drive, but is simply not bootable.

 

[Raincity]

If you have a Vista Home disc, just do a windows repair to the original install to fix the boot sector. Reinstall windows again but leave the original Windows install intact. Find the disc recovery creation app within the old install and run it to create a set of recovery CD's Reboot and destroy all partitons and reinstall via burnt recovery CD's

 

[jjsbasmt]

That would be ideal, but since I don't have one, I tried Partition Magic, Paragon Disk Manager and even a Vista Ult 32 bit full disc to no avail. I guess it's time to throw in the towel and wait till Monday for the Recovery Set. Thanks every one for your advice. Hope all of you had a niceThanksgiving.

 

[Raincity]

That would be ideal, but since I don't have one, I tried Partition Magic, Paragon Disk Manager and even a Vista Ult 32 bit full disc to no avail. I guess it's time to throw in the towel and wait till Monday for the Recovery Set. Thanks every one for your advice. Hope all of you had a niceThanksgiving.

You should be able to preform the task I posted with a Vista Ult disc. All your trying to do is get a temporary working install of windows so you can gain acess to the disc recovery utiltity from the previous install, thats going to create a set of disc' from the info stored on the recovery partition.

 

[RebateMonger]

I guess it's time to throw in the towel and wait till Monday for the Recovery Set.

Sounds like an idea. You could end up putting a lot of time into this and will probably want to redo everything on Monday anyway.

Hopefully your family will tell all their friends to make or order Recovery disks BEFORE they need them.

 

[EQTitan]

I thought for Dell's it was to press CTRL+F11 I mean thats what I've always done =)

 

[AFurryReptile]

Have you thought about just trying to create a new boot sector with something like EasyBCD?

 

[jjsbasmt]

Going to try the EasyBCD on Friday. This computer is an HP Media Center with TV. By HP I mean Hewlett Packard in case anyone was mislead by my original post. You guys are so correct about making Recovery Sets. This is the second system brought to me in the last 3 weeks that I had to order Recovery Discs from HP. The family that has this current system has had it about 2 years and they never knew how to use the TV Tuner card and they said the sound went out 2 months after they bought the system new.
By the way it's a HP, with an Athlon 6000 carrying 3 GB RAM. I'm thinking that when they get it back they will enjoy the TV and sound again. I promised to go to there home and show them the use of Media Center with the TV/DVR capabilities.

 

[jjsbasmt]

Update: The Recovery Discs came this past week and were of no use. Would not work and got a message saying that they were not the correct set. All the numbers matched but no go, and I even noticed on HP's web support site that several people had the same problems with the Recovery Discs that Hp sent them also. Solution: I loaded Vista Ult 32 on the drive and used Paragon Partition Manager to allow me to boot off the Recovery Partition (Factory Image), and restore the system. I had no idea that the Recovery Partition was bootable. The only issue I have is how to get analog sound out of the Realtek Onboard Sound chipset. It only seems to output a Digital signal. Once again, HP's web site mentions several people with this problem too, but offers little in the way of a solution.