HP recovery expertise needed.

August 17, 2004 4:17 PM

Does anybody have experience with HP Recovery? I have a tricky case.

While I was gone last week, my girl rebooted my HP computer, got a warning about "do you want to start recovery?" and hit "next." Realizing that whatever was happening wasn't good, she turned the box off halfway through.

Now I have a corrupt windows install that won't boot. It looks like none of the data, program settings, etc has been damaged.

What do I now? Do I have to run the recovery again? Supposedly it keeps my files--but does it leave my applications? I have another big drive that I can boot to, and I can back up anything, but I'd rather not reinstall all my software.

How to proceed?

posted by muckster to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

With my HP laptop (circa 2001), the recovery disk sets it to factory settings regardless of what I want. In other words, I defintely loose anything and everything I added sinse the day I got the laptop (and this comes from using the recovery disk at least 5 times. However, this was also with ME, so a later edition windows might be a different story).
I don't have my HP anymore (thank you Best Buy lemon policy), but also note that some of them come with a plethura of utilities, some of which might be of use to recover your boot sector.
posted by jmd82 at 7:42 PM on August 17, 2004