HP Desktop - How to reformat without discs?

C

Chomp

Gawd
Joined
Sep 16, 2003
Messages
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I'd like to reformat the HP desktop we have for my mom. It's about 6 months old. It did not come with any recovery disks or windows xp disks (circuit city wanted like $200 to get those).

It came with the hard drive partitioned into the regular c: drive and another drive called "recovery" that is about 8gb. When you try to get into the recovery drive it a dialog comes up saying that it's for fixing your computer basically.

So when I start up, I can press F10 to get into the recovery console, but I am not sure what I need to do to get the reformat going.


Is there another way to reformat, or do I have to go through the recovery console? If I have to use the console, what are the commands that I need?

thanks
 
You can either go through F10 and follow the prompts, or you can call up HP and ask for the discs. You'll have to pay a small fee for shipping, but then you'll have the discs.

Also, every HP I've seen has a link on the desktop to create you're own set of recovery discs.
 
Is there any way to make recovery disks or recover the OS if the original partition is no longer there?

The 8gb recovery partition is intact, but the original windows xp is no longer there... i formatted that because it was so messed up i couldn't even boot up to make the recovery disks.

So now I have a generic windows xp on that partition, along with the other 8gb recovery partition. So is there any way to restore now?

If not, and I need the disks, how do I go about getting them?
 
I can still press F10 and load into the recovery command prompt, but I am unsure how to proceed from there
 
if you press F10 and get a command prompt


ur recovery partition is hosed as well




call hp and order more, it is your only option
 
UPDATE:

Okay, I installed a bootleg version of windows xp MCE just for the time being. I would still like to make the recovery disks if possible. The problem is that since this is a generic version of XP MCE, there is not program that allows you to make the recovey disks. I still have the recovery partition intact, but I can't just access it, it just brings up a dialog that says "recovery partition, don't delete, etc."

Is there an HP or other program that would allow me to make the disks?
 
At this point I'd do these two things;

1) Don't admit to using a pirated copy.
2) Call HP as has been suggested several times and get the replacement discs.
 
djnes said:
At this point I'd do these two things;

1) Don't admit to using a pirated copy.
2) Call HP as has been suggested several times and get the replacement discs.
Click to expand...

Oh.. well i didn't mean pirated when I said bootleg.. although i guess one would think that. I used to copy that is from my computer to install on my mom's.

But anyway, I got it up and running for the time being so i'll just order the recovery disks. thanks
 
Do you know the letter of the partition? You might be able to access it via a dos command D:/SETUP.EXE If the partition contains the right file, it would start setup. I just used D as an example, it could be any letter, but I would guess D.
 
Stop confusing him :p Get the recovery discs!

Wow ok sorry for the duplicate... I'm not used to editing with what appears to be new forum software...
 
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