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