HP System Recovery

[spa77]

Guys,
I'm currently working on a HP Pavilion PC and trying to restore it back to its original state (Windows ME) - it has been worked on unsuccessfully by a previous IT specialist. The hard drive has been completely wiped of all partition information (via FDISK) and is ready to be recovered. The PC boots with the first recovery disk and works through copying a few files from the CD and displays a message stating that if it is a HP Pavilion PC please ring HP Support, then reboots. HP could offer no assistance as it is out of warranty. I suspect that it has had the BIOS updated or similar which is why the original disks do not work. Can anyone shed some light on how I may be able to restore this PC?

Thanks.

 

[mainegeek]

spa77,
It probably needs a partition on it first. So try partitioning it (FDISK) first using a WinME boot disk.

You can get one here if you don't have one.

http://www.bootdisk.com/

 

[spa77]

That was my next trick. I partitioned the hard drive first using the installation CD and then from a book disk downloaded from the web. Still no luck. I managed to break into the recovery script before the error appears and it seems to do a lot of copying files then sets and references the restore CD as the M: drive. Cannot get much further than this as it runs an exe file which produces the error.

Any ideas? If this doesn't work, I may have to go back to Windows 98SE!

 

[mainegeek]

spa77,
If there is 2 cdrom drives sharing one controller (master/slave) then you will want to disconnect one leaving the other as master. Preferably the original one that came with the pc.

I have run into this problem many times.

Also you may want to try formatting the drive first as well.

 

[spa77]

There is only 1 cd drive in the system and that's the same model that was distributed with the PC. I also tried formatting in addition still with no luck.

I found out through trial and error and searching the net for information about the specific model, that both the motherboard and processor have been replaced with would explain why the recovery disks no longer work. From what I understand, the recovery process read some settings in the BIOS (that is locked to the user) and if it find what it expects, the recovery can continue. If not, it assumes that you're installing on a non-HP computer which is obviously against the license agreement.

All up, I have decided that Window 98SE is the best option. It is mainly going to be used by children to play educational games and the like. It just would have been nice to get the PC back to it's original settings.

Thanks Guys.