Oops I screwed up!

[Budman]

Need Help. I'm working on an HP Pavilion a288n & it was so messed up it wouldn't even boot. So I took the harddrive out & put it in a spare PC I have. I saved the info they wanted off it. Scanned it with AVG8 & It had tons of nasty spyware & 6-8 trojans. I cleaned it up & put it back in the HP & it still wouldn't boot. I booted off a XP HOME cd I had into recovery console & did a fixboot & fixmbr. Now I was going to reboot & hit the F-10 recovery key & reinstall the OS. I think when I did the fixmbr it wiped out the info the PC needed to see the D: drive recovery partition. Is there any way to fix this? The recovery files are still there how would I go about & start the windows setup process.

 

[Budman]

WOW I must have really screwed this up. Anyhow here is a bump for good measure.

 

[ThreeDee]

if you saved everything that was important .. I would just delete the partitions and then create just one partition using the whole drive and the reinstall windows .. go to HP.com and download all necessary drivers and then get them protected with various spyware apps like
-spywareblaster
-superantispyware
-spybot s&d
...etc
...and then load up avg free or antivir or avast for virus protection

get them updated to sp3 and all other windows updates.

Possibly load them up with open office to replace their microsoft office suite that probably came preloaded and "the gimp" and other free open source apps.

 

[DeaconFrost]

You could also boot off the XP Home disc and run a repair install, but I'd only do this if the service pack levels of the disc and the install matched. If they don't you can slipstream SP3 into the XP Home disc and do a fresh install, as mentioned in the post above mine.

 

[Budman]

Thanks guys for the responses so far. So there is no easy way to recreate the path (f-10 on bootup) that boots me into the Recovery setup screen?. I have left the Recovery Partition intact. I have the retail version of XPHome & I'm sure this PC has the OEM version. I'm not sure if I can install off my disk & use their windows key.

I would at least like to be able to save their version of XP off the Recovery partition & use it to reinstall XP. I tried booting off a floppy & running setup off the Recovery Partition but got an error message that setup will not run in DOS.

Anybody know how I can at least install XP off the Recovery partition?

Again, many thanks for the suggestions so far.

 

[Budman]

bump for good measure.

 

[Joe Average]

From my experience here's one tip that might - and this is a BIG MIGHT work:

Get a copy of Parted Magic (note: that is NOT Partition Magic from Powerquest/Symantec) and use it to change the Active partition from the busted one to the Recovery partition on that HP box. All you're doing is changing which partition is the Active one - this alters which one the machine will boot from.

Technically it should boot from that Recovery partition after this alteration is made because of how HP works the Recovery partition these days. It's just using a derivative of WinPE custom made for HP to do the basic restoration work, so when you alter the Active partition it should boot right into the Recovery stuff.

I can't guarantee that's the case on that machine, I just know in the past 2 years or so that's allowed me to access and restore HP hardware to factory state at least long enough to make a proper CD/DVD that I then give the customer after I've wiped everything off the box and done a proper very clean installation.

Again, it should work as long as the Recovery partition is still in place. The boot records and boot files are actually on that Recovery partition and not on the "primary" partition so changing the Active one brings it back to a bootable condition.

At least that's how it's worked for me...

 

[Budman]

Joe Average From my experience here's one tip that might - and this is a BIG MIGHT work:

Get a copy of Parted Magic (note: that is NOT Partition Magic from Powerquest/Symantec) and use it to change the Active partition from the busted one to the Recovery partition on that HP box. All you're doing is changing which partition is the Active one - this alters which one the machine will boot from.

Technically it should boot from that Recovery partition after this alteration is made because of how HP works the Recovery partition these days. It's just using a derivative of WinPE custom made for HP to do the basic restoration work, so when you alter the Active partition it should boot right into the Recovery stuff.

I can't guarantee that's the case on that machine, I just know in the past 2 years or so that's allowed me to access and restore HP hardware to factory state at least long enough to make a proper CD/DVD that I then give the customer after I've wiped everything off the box and done a proper very clean installation.

Again, it should work as long as the Recovery partition is still in place. The boot records and boot files are actually on that Recovery partition and not on the "primary" partition so changing the Active one brings it back to a bootable condition.

At least that's how it's worked for me...

Joe I want to thank you as your suggestion worked perfectly. Thanks again to all who took the time to reply.