HP Pavillion Recovery
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My parents bought a HP Pavillion machine recently. The manual describes how to burn recovery/reinstallation CDs from the recovery partition. I guess HP can save a dollar or two by this.
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I worked on an interesting system yesterday - an HP Pavillion. The XP system had become totally deranged, with all critical troubleshooting files reported as 'not found' and the Help system completely missing. I assume this was due to a virus, but since NAV had also disappeared there was no way to confirm this. But what I found curious is that HP has joined the ranks of those scurrilous OEMs that refuse to provide an OS CD with their products - a completely sufficient reason never to buy their machines, IMHO. What they do provide, though, is an image of the original configuration on a hidden partition of the hard drive. How the heck do you make a partition hidden? Are other OEMs using this technique? Restoring is a matter of rebooting and pressing F10 at the first blue splash screen, and whatever is driving the restore does a very good job of repairing the system without erasing user data. Programs installed after receipt have to be reinstalled, of course, as their registry entries are erased, but the data files are intact - a much better job than Windows itself does. But what happens to users who have the misfortune of losing their hard drive? "My Fridge Science Experiment can beat up your Fridge Science Experiment."
Roger Wright wrote: a completely sufficient reason never to buy their machines, IMHO. Here IS one reason to buy HP: My HP motherboard went ashes to ashes( my fault alittle:)) at 15.00 one afternoon. I had a new motherboard the next morning at 11.00. The woman that delivered the motherboard even smiled at me. That is what I call service! jhaga --------------------------------- Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. Henry David Thoreau, "Walden", 1854
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Roger Wright wrote: a completely sufficient reason never to buy their machines, IMHO. Here IS one reason to buy HP: My HP motherboard went ashes to ashes( my fault alittle:)) at 15.00 one afternoon. I had a new motherboard the next morning at 11.00. The woman that delivered the motherboard even smiled at me. That is what I call service! jhaga --------------------------------- Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. Henry David Thoreau, "Walden", 1854
That is impressive service, entirely opposite of my experience with HP support, though I've only called them for warrantee work on printers and those beastly multifunction monstrosities they sell. I've had great support from Micron and Dell, though. Unfortunately finding a woman to deliver it here with enough teeth to risk a smile proved impossible.:( "My Fridge Science Experiment can beat up your Fridge Science Experiment."
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That is impressive service, entirely opposite of my experience with HP support, though I've only called them for warrantee work on printers and those beastly multifunction monstrosities they sell. I've had great support from Micron and Dell, though. Unfortunately finding a woman to deliver it here with enough teeth to risk a smile proved impossible.:( "My Fridge Science Experiment can beat up your Fridge Science Experiment."
In all fairness I must admit that the woman was my local postman (woman?). She always rings twice on the doorbell but I still can't figure out why.. jhaga --------------------------------- Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. Henry David Thoreau, "Walden", 1854
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I've used FDISK a lot, but never noticed a "Hide this partition" option before. For this method to work a special BIOS would also be required, allowing the F10 key to cause an alternate boot program to load. I'm just curious about the details of how this works. "My Fridge Science Experiment can beat up your Fridge Science Experiment."
In order to hide partitions the value 10h is added to the partition ID. And in order to make a partition visible only this value 10h needs to be subtracted from the partition ID. Partition Magic and similar partition managers will do this. I misspoke by using FDISK as an example. The F10 diagnostic partition may not really be "hidden", it's either a Fat12 partition, which Windows does not recognize or else a type 84 partition, which is a Suspend to Disk (S2D) partition. In newer systems, F10 is a BIOS function, while on older systems, the boot loader detects the F10 interrupt and loads the alternate partition.
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In all fairness I must admit that the woman was my local postman (woman?). She always rings twice on the doorbell but I still can't figure out why.. jhaga --------------------------------- Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. Henry David Thoreau, "Walden", 1854
:laugh::laugh::laugh: Rob Manderson http://www.mindprobes.net You have an eight-ball and Tommy wants to buy two grams. You bought the eight-ball with a quarter-bag of grass, two reds, a six-pack of Old Milwaukie, and $4 in change. You want a profit margin of 35%. How much hash should you get from Tommy for your blow? - Roger Wright
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Roger Wright wrote: a completely sufficient reason never to buy their machines, IMHO. Here IS one reason to buy HP: My HP motherboard went ashes to ashes( my fault alittle:)) at 15.00 one afternoon. I had a new motherboard the next morning at 11.00. The woman that delivered the motherboard even smiled at me. That is what I call service! jhaga --------------------------------- Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. Henry David Thoreau, "Walden", 1854
I've never gotten that good of service from any tech company before. Matt Newman
Sonork: 100:11179 "If you're Noah and you're facing the Flood, don't call a lawyer, start building an Ark." - David Cunningham -
I worked on an interesting system yesterday - an HP Pavillion. The XP system had become totally deranged, with all critical troubleshooting files reported as 'not found' and the Help system completely missing. I assume this was due to a virus, but since NAV had also disappeared there was no way to confirm this. But what I found curious is that HP has joined the ranks of those scurrilous OEMs that refuse to provide an OS CD with their products - a completely sufficient reason never to buy their machines, IMHO. What they do provide, though, is an image of the original configuration on a hidden partition of the hard drive. How the heck do you make a partition hidden? Are other OEMs using this technique? Restoring is a matter of rebooting and pressing F10 at the first blue splash screen, and whatever is driving the restore does a very good job of repairing the system without erasing user data. Programs installed after receipt have to be reinstalled, of course, as their registry entries are erased, but the data files are intact - a much better job than Windows itself does. But what happens to users who have the misfortune of losing their hard drive? "My Fridge Science Experiment can beat up your Fridge Science Experiment."
I just bought a Sony Vaio desktop, it has a recovery DVD which I used twice in a day [ two days after buying it ]. It's a great way to help newbies which screw up their install... takes just a few minutes to restore... but... HECK! I WANT SEPARATE DRIVERS FOR MY PERIPHERALS! I need IIS. They provide me with WinXP Home. No problem, format and install it. Oh, my motherboard and integrated peripherals are not recognized. Google. Get Blaster. Remove it by hand, apply the patch. Google again. Download SiSoft Sandra, get motherboard model. Google for drivers. Go on ASUS website. This model is not even listed, must be an OEM release, so surf to Sony Vaio support site. Enter product code, they want to give me only my drivers. Nice, but my product code is not listed in their database. Restore WinXP Home and say goodbye to local ASP development. But I don't surrender. I found I can extract the drivers from the winxp home installation [ no, I can't extract them from the recovery dvd, they are compressed in some proprietary format ], so I'm backing up my perfectly-configured pc to dvd's for a fast recovery, and tomorrow I'll try to get that damn WinXP Pro working. Tell a prayer to the Good Marketing Lords for me, tonight. Luca Leonardo Scorcia http://zip.to/kojak (only in Italian)
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I worked on an interesting system yesterday - an HP Pavillion. The XP system had become totally deranged, with all critical troubleshooting files reported as 'not found' and the Help system completely missing. I assume this was due to a virus, but since NAV had also disappeared there was no way to confirm this. But what I found curious is that HP has joined the ranks of those scurrilous OEMs that refuse to provide an OS CD with their products - a completely sufficient reason never to buy their machines, IMHO. What they do provide, though, is an image of the original configuration on a hidden partition of the hard drive. How the heck do you make a partition hidden? Are other OEMs using this technique? Restoring is a matter of rebooting and pressing F10 at the first blue splash screen, and whatever is driving the restore does a very good job of repairing the system without erasing user data. Programs installed after receipt have to be reinstalled, of course, as their registry entries are erased, but the data files are intact - a much better job than Windows itself does. But what happens to users who have the misfortune of losing their hard drive? "My Fridge Science Experiment can beat up your Fridge Science Experiment."
When the HD on a pavillion I was using crashed HP sent a pack of 6 CDs to restore everything. However it took about 3 hours of being ping ponged between clueless tech reps to get the CDs. I also tried using the CDs on another brand of computer. No dice, the software is smart enough to check whether the hardware really is a HP pavillion.
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In order to hide partitions the value 10h is added to the partition ID. And in order to make a partition visible only this value 10h needs to be subtracted from the partition ID. Partition Magic and similar partition managers will do this. I misspoke by using FDISK as an example. The F10 diagnostic partition may not really be "hidden", it's either a Fat12 partition, which Windows does not recognize or else a type 84 partition, which is a Suspend to Disk (S2D) partition. In newer systems, F10 is a BIOS function, while on older systems, the boot loader detects the F10 interrupt and loads the alternate partition.
:-D Thanks for the info, Ed! "My Fridge Science Experiment can beat up your Fridge Science Experiment."