[Wisdom2]

Dear Geeks Please HELP!

I have a Compaq Presario V5205NR PC, which has a recovery partition of 8GB size with the option of creating a pair of recovery disks which will do same job of restoring your PC to factory state.

So I was using the Recovery Disks of this PC and this is what happened.

I as per PC instructions inserted recovery disk 1 of 2 into drive and hit the power button.

The black PC screen then gave 2 option, 1 for Non-Destructive restore or 2nd one for Destructive restore, I chose destructive restore - to be sure my PC would be Virgin Clean!

A white bar progressed at bottom of screen to 1/8 way and my area had a power failure so my PC stopped. When power came back I repeated the process as there was no other choice.

This time I did not get the 2 options, what I got was a white bar at bottom of screen that progressed until it ran all the way from the left to the right, then a new blank screen appeared with the following message:

"No Operating System Installed or Partition Corruption"
"Press R to preform a Full PC Recovery"

Then I did that I hit "R", so a white progress bar ran at bottom of screen when it finished I got a screen with the message:

"No Hard Drive Found"
"PC Recovery cannot be continued".

Now if I use a USB bootable program such a "Active@ Kill Disk", I can see the USB flash disk info and MY PC's hard rive info saying its size is about 60 GB.

Please help me, I know if the power failure had not happened then all would have restored to barnd new state fine. I suspect if Compaq had included a Windows XP DVD disk, then that would have been able to work power failure or not would not have resulted in this situation. But most major PC makers do not include the Windows operating system disk, just a restore image or ability to make one.

Also:
My hard drive is fine, I can run dos and Linux programs, infact one called Parted Magic has system diagnostics, and the hard drive passes and it has a Linux version of google Chrome browser and I can brows the web via that and store and read from hard drive/

My HP branded drive is actually Segate Momentus 60GB, so I have run the SeaTools for DOS and my hard drive passed all tests. Can it be that HP/Compaq have so anti piracy measure for Win XP in the restore disk that gets tripped when no operating system is found as will happen if power goes out or you shut off PC as the restore is happening.

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Howszit Wisdom2?

Sorry to hear that the power went out at a critical stage of your product recovery. I see from the specs that your running a SATA hard drive. I'd check the CMOS settings for the hard drive and change it to a compatibility mode, (Windows XP was designed before SATA drives and I have had cases where XP refused to see SATA hard drives. Changing the drive mode in CMOS allowed XP to load properly. I know there's other ways around this, but this was the easiest method I found for this problem).

Hope this helps

[Mark D]

Howszit Wisdom2?

Sorry to hear that the power went out at a critical stage of your product recovery. I see from the specs that your running a SATA hard drive. I'd check the CMOS settings for the hard drive and change it to a compatibility mode, (Windows XP was designed before SATA drives and I have had cases where XP refused to see SATA hard drives. Changing the drive mode in CMOS allowed XP to load properly. I know there's other ways around this, but this was the easiest method I found for this problem).

Hope this helps

[Mark D]

Sorry but my brian cells have remembered a HP/Compaq notebook that I worked on not so long ago. It had two recovery disks. One was to prep the drive before the XP restore could be run. You might have a drive prep CD as well...