HP Pavilion a800n Recovery

Hello. I have an HP Pavilion a800n that I bought second hand. I asked the person who sold it to me if there were any restore disks. They only said it had a Recovery
Partition I could use (caveat emptor!). I want to restore the disk to its original condition.

The Recovery partition (H:HP_RECOVERY) is accessible as I am able to list its contents in Windows Explorer.

It appears that at some time in the past Recovery disks were created as there aren't any Recovery program menus under Start-->Programs. No Creator.exe on H: drive
for creating recovery disks only H:\TOOLS\windows\CREATOR\Tool CD.INP exists there.

I created a DOS boot disk, booted from it, ran FDISK, changed Active partition to H: and rebooted. The system appeared to accept the change of H: as Active but I when
I tried to boot PC hangs with blinking cursor in upper left hand corner of screen.

On the H:RECOVERY partition there exists a MiniNT\system32\start file. If I issue
"MiniNT\system32\start.exe /run" from a DOS prompt while in the current Windows XP OS, will this start the restore operation?

I don't have any other recovery media so I don't want to start something that will leave me with an inoperable system. I already know I can purchase either a new
copy of XP Home or contact HP for Recovery Disks but I'd kind of like to use the existing files on the H: drive as long as they are already there.

Many thanks for any suggestions.

-William

I'm not sure what you did by changing the active partition to H, but the HP recovery partition is desigened to boot when you hold down f10 when the system is turned on

Thanks for your reply Geo.

I was aware of the F10 fix and had tried it but to no effect. Also tried F11-F**K but the system didn't respond to any of them. :)

Seems I answered my own question though. From a DOS window I set my path to the H: drive and ran the command "MiniNT\system32\start.exe /run". The HP recovery splash page came up and asked me if I wanted to begin the recovery process; no cd disc creation step involved. I haven't actually run it all the way through yet (need to back up a few files first) but I know how to access it now which was my main concern.

Many thanks again to you and previous posters here (especially Budman) to help me finger out this strange thing HP does to their systems. :thumbs: