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Byte-Able
08-04-2010, 07:31 PM
Afternoon all,

I have a HP Slimline s3720y in here that my girlfriend's boss's son tried to install linux on to and failed miserably. He wiped the windows partition but not the recovery partition. They bought the computer about a year ago and never created the recovery disks like you are supposed to. Now seeing that I can't boot this into Windows as it is no longer there, I can not create a set of recovery disks.

Does anyone know of a way to create these disks off the recovery partition if I slave the drive to my bench machine? Is this even possible or do I need to call HP and have them send out recovery disks. I am trying to get this down for tomorrow as his son is getting ready to head of to school on Friday so getting the disks from HP is not going to be that fast.

I am stumped here and any help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Alex
TLE
08-04-2010, 08:03 PM
I'm struggling to understand why don't you just use the recovery parition to re-install windows if it's still there?

Hit the F11 key after the system posts and it should boot to the recovery partition. Just follow the instructions from that point.
WHEELS
08-04-2010, 08:10 PM
That's the beauty of having a recovery partition. No discs needed unless it gets erased too.

Like TLE said, just hit F11 and follow the instructions.
Byte-Able
08-04-2010, 08:11 PM
If it would do that I would. When I hit F11 it is as if I am not even hitting the key. It just skips over it and tries to boot. ESC, F9, and the F-key that enter BIOS all work, but when I try F11 for System Recovery I get nothing.

I have tried 2 separate keyboards to rule out a keyboard issue with no luck.

Thanks,

Alex
iptech
08-04-2010, 08:26 PM
Use a partition manager to set the Recovery Partition as active.
TLE
08-04-2010, 08:31 PM
Sounds like the boot partition is no longer ACTIVE.

Can you boot into an external enviroment and mark the recovery partition as ACTIVE?

lol, iptech beat me to it :0)
Xander
08-04-2010, 09:49 PM
Had something similar last week. HP where the Windows partition had corrupted. Customer encouraged me to wipe it to undo any mess left by the kids. Marked the recovery partition as Active and the rest is cake. Oh, and then another half hour decrapifying it.

I used a gPartEd live disc.
JW The Computer Guy
08-05-2010, 02:21 AM
Recently i had a computer with an infected recovery partition, I don't trust them.
geekhelp4u
08-05-2010, 04:42 PM
Recently i had a computer with an infected recovery partition, I don't trust them.

I have seen 3 HP machines with the recovery partition infected in the past month alone. I now delete the recovery partition from the machines and NEVER use them.
BeyondReality
08-06-2010, 01:17 AM
Recovery Partitions are the worst, I never use them either. I actually make sure I delete them. That was just a way for the companies to try and save a few bucks so they dont have to send you CDs

As for the original post, if you cant boot to that partition it sounds like he did delete it, or atleast the contents. Just get a windows CD off Ebay and do a fresh install.