Question

I have someones presario V3000 laptop. It has a D drive which is the recovery partition. The user brought it to me and windows would no longer even boot up. I could only reload XP and try to find a way to recover from the recovery partition. However haven't been able to.

I read, hold F11 down when booting up, but that didn't do anything, and the other item I read is to create the CDs from the software installed in the OS from the factory. Well that is the OS that went corrupt and is no longer there. A new reloaded version of XP is there now.

Is there still a way I can either create recover CD's/DVD's or boot from the recovery partition?

Answer 1

F11 is how HP says to initiate the recovery process for the Presario V3000. If that's not working, you have 2 options:

1. Buy replacement recovery CDs from HP (assuming they're still available), and run the recovery tool from them when they show up. See the bottom "see also" section of the linked page for a link to the purchase option.

2. Give up, and live with your current XP install (or repartition your hard drive and reinstall, to get rid of that now-useless recovery partition and make sure your C: drive has the entire hard drive).

Before you choose, you should probably try that F11 trick a few times more just to make sure.

Answer 2

F11 when booting is one possible way. Also try others- particularly F2, F8 and F10. Also escape or delete. Depends on the machine.

Otherwise, try using a live CD (maybe Ubuntu) to access the Windows OS or attempt to back up the recovery partition to DVD.

Answer 3

Smart BootManager should be able to let you choose which partition to boot from. Assuming the recovery partition is still stable, you can choose it and start the recover tools. I used to use the floppy version all the time for computers that didn't know how to boot from CDROM drives.