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Re-Enabling HP Recovery Partition

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Cant.Touch.This

Member
Joined
May 20, 2007
Location
New York
Hi, I installed Windows 7 onto my C: partition forgetting to make the recovery discs beforehand.. now I can't access the System Recovery when you press F11 during boot.

I haven't touched two other partitions on the drive, its labeled as D: RECOVERY (12.63 GB NTFS) and a System Reserved (100 MB NTFS).

I did read this:

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/psg/board/message?message.uid=128622

but when I went to mark the RECOVERY partition as active.. it warned me that the computer could stop working, I don't know how likely or unlikely this is so I could really use some feedback on this or advice before proceeding to prevent further damage.
 
Hi, I installed Windows 7 onto my C: partition forgetting to make the recovery discs beforehand.. now I can't access the System Recovery when you press F11 during boot.

I haven't touched two other partitions on the drive, its labeled as D: RECOVERY (12.63 GB NTFS) and a System Reserved (100 MB NTFS).

I did read this:

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/psg/board/message?message.uid=128622

but when I went to mark the RECOVERY partition as active.. it warned me that the computer could stop working, I don't know how likely or unlikely this is so I could really use some feedback on this or advice before proceeding to prevent further damage.

I believe the system reserved 100MB partition is from Win 7 install. Likely, what is meant that the computer might stop working if you mark the Recovery partition as active is that your current Win 7 install will not boot which could be corrected should that happen and the recovery not work.
 
that or when you installed Win7, it overwrote files (most likely modified Vista boot files) needed for the C: drive (Vista) to communicate to the recovery partition.
 
In the event that I mark the RECOVERY partition as active, and the computer won't boot, is there a way that I can go back into the desktop or DOS to use the diskpart -> list volume -> inactive?
 
Ok, so I tested this today. I have an HP notebook that I was replacing the stock 5400 RPM drive with a 7200 RPM model. I wanted to restore the stock drive with the original image before putting the drive on the shelf. It did have Win 7 on it before re-imaging the drive.

Here is what I had to do to make it work.
1. Mark Recovery partition as active.
2. Boot to Windows install media or Dos disk and delete all partitions except recovery. At the very least, the 100MB Reserved and the C drive will have to be deleted.
3. Boot and use F11 and follow the prompts. Be prepared, it takes a while.

If the recovery partition was not active then F11 would fail without DVD recovery media. If The reserved and c drive were not deleted the re-imaging would fail later in the process because the recovery manager does not know what to do with the 100MB part.

If you are concerned about what-ifs, use the Win 7 backup and restore to create an image on an external drive. If needed you can restore the win 7 system from the install media and external drive and this does work quite well.

Good luck.
 
Thank you S_Wilson for the detailed steps.

There is nothing that I consider important on the Win7 partition (nothing that I don't back up to my desktop anyways), it's just that I was a bit hesistant to proceed in the even the computer actually doesn't boot anymore.

I'm not entirely sure what the System Reserved partition is.. I don't seem to have a reserved space on any of my desktops so I'm wondering did I create it or HP made it.

I will try this on the weekend as I still need it for the rest of the week, I will report back on whether it worked or not.
 
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Thank you S_Wilson for the detailed steps.

There is nothing that I consider important on the Win7 partition (nothing that I don't back up to my desktop anyways), it's just that I was a bit hesistant to proceed in the even the computer actually doesn't boot anymore.

I'm not entirely sure what the System Reserved partition is.. I don't seem to have a reserved space on any of my desktops so I'm wondering did I create it or HP made it.

I will try this on the weekend as I still need it for the rest of the week, I will report back on whether it worked or not.

No problem. The computer will boot but you will likely not be able to get into windows which is what the warning is about. You will still be able to get to bios or install media or whatever, just not your win 7 install.

If the system reserved partition is 100MB and the first partition on the drive then Win 7 did this. It's new and depending on how one installs Win 7 it may or may not have the reserved 100MB partition. For instance, I installed Win 7 on a clean drive and used the installer to make my OS partition and it made the 100MB partition on its own. Another time I used an existing Vista drive and only formatted the Vista partition and then installed Win 7 to that partition and it did not make the system reserved partition.
 
No problem. The computer will boot but you will likely not be able to get into windows which is what the warning is about. You will still be able to get to bios or install media or whatever, just not your win 7 install.

If the system reserved partition is 100MB and the first partition on the drive then Win 7 did this. It's new and depending on how one installs Win 7 it may or may not have the reserved 100MB partition. For instance, I installed Win 7 on a clean drive and used the installer to make my OS partition and it made the 100MB partition on its own. Another time I used an existing Vista drive and only formatted the Vista partition and then installed Win 7 to that partition and it did not make the system reserved partition.

Ahh, thank you again for clearing that last bit up. :beer:
 
Hmm... I was about to proceed with the rest of the steps that you've listed out S_Wilson. While all the steps did work, I was prompt to the HP recovery but then I remembered leaving a lab report on the laptop (D'oh!) so when I tried to boot back in to my Win7 partition it says BOOTMGR missing.

I popped in my copy of Win7 and used command prompt to run bootrec /fixboot thinking it would solve the problem but it didn't. I'm not sure what to do next to fix this problem so I can just pull my report off of it real quick.

EDIT: Oh.. apparently running the automated windows startup recovery fixed it on its own.. I truly underestimated its usefulness. Not sure what it did if someone knows what it ran that I left out I'd appreciate it if someone can point it out.
 
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