[justscrapenby]

I have an eMachine W3503 that won't finish booting up. It gets to the "Windows is starting up" screen and then doen't go any further. I want to use the recovery partion (H:\MiniNT), but pressing F11 doesn't get me into it. I can access it fro the boot options screen. Is there a way to start the recovery from there?

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I'm not familiar with emachines and their recovery partition. However, most recovery partitions will wipe the drive and put the machine back to how it left the factory. You do realize that if you run the recovery, there's a chance that you'll lose all your data? Is this ok with you? If not, then do not run the recovery until you back up your data.

[makai]

I'm not familiar with emachines and their recovery partition. However, most recovery partitions will wipe the drive and put the machine back to how it left the factory. You do realize that if you run the recovery, there's a chance that you'll lose all your data? Is this ok with you? If not, then do not run the recovery until you back up your data.

[Broni]

Adding to makai's valid point...
...I think, it's Ctrl+F11.

[justscrapenby]

Thanks for your replies. I pulled the hard drive and used a usb/ide/sata adapter to hook it up to my desktop, then saved all of the data I wanted to save. I want a clean recovery. I'm not sure that what I'm seeing on the drive is a recovery partition. It says H:\MiniNT and it has recovery files in it when I accessed it from the recovery console. ctrl+F11 doesn't start the recovery.

[makai]

For some reason, I missed something in your first post. This H:\MiniNT is most likely not a recovery partition... unless it's one you created after the fact with some eMachine software. Under normal circumstances, the manufacture's recovery partition is normally hidden from the OS, so it's not something Windows will be able to see. Of course, this being an eMachine, I can't say they do the same thing as many other manufactures.

The best recommendation I can give you is to read the documentation that came with your machine to run the recovery. Do you have any documentation? By the way... read the first sentence in my signature.

[justscrapenby]

I missed that! It's an eMachine W3503. I talked to an emachine rep. She thought that it should have a recovery partition. But since it never gives me the F11 recovery option at boot up, I'm beginning to think you're right. I may have to purchase the recovery disks from the eMachines website.

[makai]

What is the H drive? Is it a CDrom or is your drive partitioned?

[justscrapenby]

That's the drive letter of the MiniNT partition.

[makai]

That's the drive letter of the MiniNT partition.

So does the H drive show up in MyComputer or in Windows Explorer. I've read that there was supposed to be a "Restore.exe" in the MiniNT folder. Have you read what the emachines documentation says about running the recovery? Do you have documentation? I'm asking so I know if I have to search for it. It would be a waste of time for me if you already have the documents.

[justscrapenby]

The H:\MiniNT shows up when I choose the Microsoft Recovery Console option. When this is selected, it opens a command line window. If I do a DIR, it shows a lot of folders/files. One is Recovery.exe. But when I type that in and hit enter, it tells me that the command is not recognized by MS Recovery Console. I have no documentation for this computer and no recovery disks.

[makai]

I'll go searching for the procedure to run the recovery. From what I read so far, the MiniNt is connected to emachines recovery, so its possible this is where emachines has stored the recovery partition. You do the same... Google is a good friend!

[makai]

By the way, in Start>All Programs, is there any eMachines software? Something like... Recovery Management... or something you can use to make recovery discs?

[justscrapenby]

I refer back to my original post. It only gets to the "Windows is starting up" screen and won't go any further.

[makai]

You didn't mention you couldn't get into Safe Mode, so I assumed you could, and I wasn't sure why you wanted to recover, or what troubleshooting you already tried. Can you boot to Safe mode?

[justscrapenby]

Can't get into safe mode either. It starts to load all of the files for safe mode, but won't finish.