HP recovery cds

nightice

Alright, my friend made the serious mistake of buying an HP Pavlion 552w about 2 years ago. He had a problem with the hal.dll, took it into staples to get it fixed, and they reformatted and reinstalled. Anyway, it happened again, used a dell restore cd. Great, but it just barely recognized his hardware. So, he used his neighbor's unknown brand recovery cd, same problem. He got the official restore cd set from HP a couple of days ago, since the hidden recovery partition got wiped out. He started up off of the first cd, and when setup got to the license screen, it bombed out, not finding the EULA file. Apparently, this is the only one he can boot off of, which is labeled "Recovery Console", and is also critical to start the recovery process. The i386 folder has far, far fewer files than it should (~220, should be ~5080). So, should he remaster the CD with the missing file(s)? Pester HP to give him a way to properly restore his system?

Q

Does it require a custom HAL or can you just install XP (Or was it 2000? Or... NT4(!)?)?

I'd try the HP line untill you get a flat rejection or fix the problem independantly.

-Q

nightice

The hal isn't the issue, I was just explaining how he got into his current situation. Yes, it was XP home.

Q

Then can he just get a regular XP CD and install XP with that?

-Q

nightice

I have no idea. Every time he's tried another method, it hasn't recognized his hardware, so I'm trying to have him use the recovery CDs so everything works. I'm thinking of having him ISOing the first CD, adding EULA.TXT, and reburning it.

wingzeroismine

Alright.... after reading this I'm NOT EVER going to delete that small little partition (~40MB) dell placed on the drive....

pcbuilderchris

wtf is 40mb reserved for if c:\windows\i386 is messed up then Dell:\40mb partition isnt shit

Thump

nightice wrote:

I have no idea. Every time he's tried another method, it hasn't recognized his hardware, so I'm trying to have him use the recovery CDs so everything works. I'm thinking of having him ISOing the first CD, adding EULA.TXT, and reburning it.

I've got the same problem. HP sucks. They put together some weird
hardware and write their own drivers to get it to work. Some of the
drivers are available at HP's website. I can install another copy of
Windows but it doesn't work right and the correct drivers aren't
available.
It should ask for another disk if it can't find the EULA. Your plan should
get him at least one step forward. You might can make another
partition and put the contents of all the CDs in it and try it from there.
I never got the restore CDs so I'm not sure.
I've never solved my problem. I have one old image file I made that
can put it back but it's a little bit fowled up. Then I can update it with
XP Pro but that won't work for you if there's no partition image.
It looks real bad.
Thump

wingzeroismine

pcbuilderchris wrote:

wtf is 40mb reserved for if c:\windows\i386 is messed up then Dell:\40mb partition isnt shit

It isn't reserved, it is used for something, I just do not know what. Windows doesn't tell me what it is, but it knows that some of it is being used. There is something of importance there.