accessing recovery partition

[ground]

The disk drive in my daughter's friend's DV1000 notebook went bad and she hadn't created a set of recovery disks. I was able to copy most of her personal data to a USB drive after booting from an Ubuntu Live CD. My daughter also has a DV1000 so I copied the recovery partitions from it (there were two - an 8G FAT32 partition labelled HP_RECOVERY and a 1.1G NTFS partition - the 8G one has, among  other things, a MiniNT and an i386 directory, while the 1.1G partition looks like a minimal Windows install. I don't if one or both are the recovery paritions. The 1.1G doesn't mount in Windows but the 8G one does - at least on my daughter's computer).

Anyway, the data I was able to salvage from the bad drive's Windows partition wasn't enough to get it to boot. It starts up but locks up after getting partway into the boot. I get no response anytime during the startup from the F11 key. It also won't boot into safe mode.

I don't have another XP/Home CD but I did get to a recovery console from an XP/Pro CD. I ran bootcfg to add the two other partitions to the Windows boot menu. Unfortunately, the 8G partition complains about the SYSTEM32 directory on boot, while the 1.1G partition blue screens about 10 or 15 seconds after showing the Windows arrow cursor (on a black background).

I tried to create a set of recovery disks from my daughter's DV1000 but the recovery utility says I've already created a  set and won't let me. My daughter says she doesn't have a set, so I'm out of luck on that front.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get into the recovery program?

[ground]

Further to my previous post, I've identified the 1.2G partition as a "quick boot for multimedia playback". The 8G partition seems to be the recovery partition (as labelled). It contains, among other things, a series of 620M files that I'd guess are CD images of some kind. They're in a "preload" directory and named like base_99.inp.

The partition contains a boot.ini that is possibly not used as it contains a reference to Windows XP Professional. My guess is that there's something earlier in the boot process that grabs the F11 key and boots from the second partition, or from the third if it detects a multimedia CD/DVD in the drive.

Obviously that's not the whole story however, as neither partition seems to be bootable through the normal boot process. The \windows\system32\config\system program seems to be customised for each partition. In the recovery partition that is actually \minint\system32\config but there is no system program, which causes the normal boot process to choke. In the multimedia partition, things start but then blue screen before the multimedia application starts. However, moving the system program to the first partition actually starts the multimedia application (instead of Windows).

 I'd guess that the same setup is used on other HP computers. The process is probably something that Windows gurus pick up but which doesn't seem to be documentedvery well.

Does anyone know the Windows boot process well enough to figure out how I can get the recovery partition to work?

[CherylG]

Copy only the 8 gb partition to the  hdd, next "Mark it as Active". On reboot from hdd you should boot into Recovery to reinstall Windows.

Or, just create an Image of the hdd in daughters laptop and restore it to the friends laptop hdd....if they are the same model.

Macrium Reflect Disk Imaging:

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

Message Edited by CherylG on 12-03-2009 10:38 PM