What Donna says is correct. To add to it, there should be an HP utility
that will allow you to burn your own set of restore CD's, from the hidden
partition. At least it was available on a 764n that I had. After making
the set of CD's, (8 of them, as I recall), I went into the BIOS, and set the
boot options, to allow booting from the CD. I booted from the XP CD, and
proceeded to delete ALL the partitions, including the hidden one, with all
the original OS, and apps. I proceeded in creating one large partition,
formatting the drive with NTFS, and installing XP.
Of course, after you do this, you can not recover any of the apps that came
with the machine, because doing so, would require you to restore the system
back to it's original state, from HP. This was not a concern for me.
Bill Crocker
Donna M said:
-----Original Message-----
Hi
I was just about to format XP on my friends H.P. the normal way from the CD
etc., yet when I reboot the PC it doesn't give you the option of pressing
any key on the boot process ,it 's first display is the black WindowsXP
screen with the blue rectangles moving left to right
also ive noted there is another drive [D] called HP recovery ,is this
needed??
& 1 last thing she wasn't given a CD on buying the PC ,not knowing the 5x5
Microsoft code ,should I use a XP code changer & change it?
thanks
Judy
.Beware when making changes on a Hewlett Packard. I am
going through the same process now.
The HP_Recovery is a pre-loaded recovery console pre-
loaded at the factory, it is a "hidden partition" that
contains the system operating/recovery information that
was originally loaded by the manufacturer, to bring the
system back to it's original state at the time of
purchase. It was put there so that there were no "CD"
type disks to break, scratch, or lose in the event that
you needed to "re-install" the orginal operating system,
per se. This is important, I wouldn't advise
destroying it..(see
www.hp.com/cposupport/eschome.html).
This is why your afriends computer didn't come with a XP
HOME/PRO OEM operating system CD nor the recovery CDs
that they speak of. You will have to order those
(see "Recovering the System after the Hard Drive is
Replaced"..
If you received a CD it Probably says Microsoft "Works &
Money 2002"? I'm guessing...I throught that was the O/S
Disk, and its not..
