dv6000 Recovery Loop/Not Sticking

[Envoker]

Hello all! Good morning!

     Here is my problem; I have a HP dv6000 that I purchased back in '06.It has been running fine (a couple overheating problems that were fixed by sending it in. Mainboard issues I guess), until a couple weeks ago when I noticed it began to slow down considerably.Thinking back, it had been almost a year since my last formatting, so I decided last night to attempt to format it once more.

     I've been at it for 7 hours now.

    When I ordered the laptop, I opted to receive the recovery CD/DVD with it in case something were to happen to the recovery partition, and now I feel that I'm stuck in a hole. I first attempted to do a factory settings recovery. I restarted the laptop, and found that hitting F11 didn't do anything. Okay....right. I went back into windows to ensure that the recovery partition is indeed still there, and it was. I tried it again, then did a hard restart, took out the battery and AC adaptor, held the button down for 10 seconds, put the AC adaptor back in and tried F11/F10 again....nothing. 

    Ok, I have my recovery CD I tell myself. I'll just do a clean install, leaving the recovery partition in tact. No problem. I resize the partitions around the recovery slot, making sure not to touch that, and continue with the install. It goes seamlessly, but when the laptop reboots, it boots into the PC Recovery program.

  Uh oh. 

   I tell it to quit, and when it reboots, it boots back into the PC Recovery program again. Right. I tell it to attempt a Windows System Restore to an earlier date. It tells me "Please restart your system and use the Windows System Restore tool", or something along those lines and restarts.....again it boots right back into the PC Recovery main menu. At this point I'm kind of frustrated, and just say to hell with it. I preformed a destructive restore, waited the 23 minutes for it to finish, it told me "Please wait while your system reboots." It restarts......again into that PC Restore program......

   I am extremely frustrated at this point. I've tried my official HP recovery CD, I've tried the partitions, I've tried chkdsk and it's come up fine. I'm oh so close to just wiping the HD and installing my own copy of Vista, or a fresh XP install on a black HD, because this is getting rediculous.

   So please, any suggestions to get out of this endless recovery loop? I've tried just hitting cancel, I've tried F11/F10, I've tried recovery disks, nothing seems to have the recovery stick, and now I regret attempting to clean it up, because I can't even get into Windows because it's wiped it out.

My specs are as follows:

HP Pavilion dv6000

Microsoft Windows XP w/ Service Pack 2 recovery disk

AMD Turion X2 1.6 (I believe it's a 1.6...)

1gb memory

I believe it's a 120gb HD, though I could be mistaken.

[Tomek_]

i dont have any option to start recovery, any in my computer, just like friend ofmy, buy i have linux (ubuntu) on external drive

1st booting from usb to load linux, boot soft name "GRUB" is started and u can choice with OS u want

and there is solution

u can choice and .... edit !!!

there i can change number of partition and start recovery

for next info u have to ask on ubuntu forum

like this one 

http://ubuntuforums.org/

[Bookworm]

A couple of things, first can you boot into the BIOS by tapping F10 as you power up?

If so go to the Diagnostic tab and run the Hard-drive diagnostic, it will run a short and long one, run them both, if either fail your hard-drive is bad.

If they pass, forget F11, at this point the OS on your Notebook is so messed up that I think you can probably only get back by running recovery (not restore) from the Disks, do you have DVD's or CD's, they should be DVD's but I just want to check.

You then put in the first one and boot off that, not sure if you have changed the boot order for drives in the BIOS but if you did go back in and set defaults so it can boot off the Disk when prompted.

If the recovery media is not damaged it should take about 2-4 hours for the recovery to be complete including it loading all the data from the disks and then unbundling on the Notebook, apart from changing out disks when prompted do not interact with the Notebook while it is doing this, you may see black screens, desktops, FBI GUI messages, just leave it be until it asks for the region and language settings.

I'm not too sure what you meant by resizing around the recovery slot, if you run a full factory recovery it will put the recovery partition onto your system , you don't have to do anything to help it with that.

Please let me know what happens

[Envoker · Accepted solution]

Ok, going to try to reply to everyone in order;

@Tomek - Are you talking about just installing GRUB to a EHDD and running it from there and just using that? I used to have a linux partition on my laptop until I had to send it in for repairs a year or so ago, when they wiped it and had to get rid of it. Unfortunately with this model of laptop, there are no supported Ubuntu wireless drivers, so it's literally imposibble to install and update without hacked drivers.....which sucks. Not worth the time/effort for someone who doesn't program/work in remote interfaces.

@Bookworm - Thanks for the help! Unfortuantely, I already stated I had the recovery DVDs and tried them, and they didn't work as when I restarted the laptop, it just booted right back into the recovery mode. I already tried running a chkdsk and HD check, which are essentially the same file ran from different places, and it passed. 

                      By 'Resizing around the recovery slot', (bear with me, I had been up for almost 22 hours), I had meant in the windows set up, deleting the other partitions and merging them into one partition separate from the recovery, a la a factory installation. Needless to say, that failed as well as once windows was finished installing, it booted into the recovery partition.

 I am quite tech saavy, being in an IT program, but this problem baffled me until I decided to try something really extreme. After the 3rd destructive recovery, 2nd attempt at a Windows System Restore, and 2nd Recovery DVD use, and none of them working, I decided to do it my own way. I inserted the Recovery DVD, booted into it from the BIOS, and waited for that blue screen that details the partitions to show up. Knowing what a partition is, and what is needed for a factory install, I deleted every partition except for the Recovery on, then preformed a hard reset, knowing it would go into recovery mode. At this time, this is what my drives would look like;

Unpartitioned Space: 82500mb

Recovery Partition: 9570mb

   The hard reset succeeds, and it boots into the PC Recovery Mode once more. I preform a destructive reset and VOILA! It works! After the reset, it boots into windows, and now it's just a matter of removing all the crap that comes with a factory install

So thanks for the help everyone! I guess I just had to take my troubleshooting to the extream. Heh.

[cpq-new]

HP recovery disk loop in the Pavilion dv2500 (dv2610us). Tried several times and it fails to complete or re-locks itself into recovery manager as mentioned. Single drive (original) HP Recovery disk for Vista 32. 2nd time through as with 1st gets almost all the way installed and then the recovery manager comes up with options greyed out. interestingly it did show the OS after being off for a while, and I was not quick enough to get the run command available and msconfig to look for a startup item FBI GUI which is the manager as far as I can tell. The drive & memory diags show no issues. The 2nd attempt was tried after removing the drive and placing it in another pc to wipe the partition table and it still does the same thing...I am suspecting after reading here that a partition/boot order issue is causing this...any help would be appreciated.

[bdc417]

Please post your Linux compatibility reviews for this product at http://ubuntuhcl.org/browse/product+hp-dv6000?id=6749