It's 2:00am... with a recovery question

[DavidJ726]

Why am I even posting at this hour??? <sigh>

It's been a long night trying to get my parents PC working. It an HP
Pavilion 733n and it's been exhibiting a lot of problems lately. So I
brought it home tonight with the intent to fix it. The bottom line is
this... The system recoveries didn't work, and there's no utility to create
a bootable CD from the recovery partition, which is the D drive, and there
were no recovery CD's provided with the PC to start with.

The problem is, after I used the restore utility (by pressing F10 at the
blue HP screen) I couldn't boot because of a bad or missing hal.dll and
probably because of all the files that failed during the extraction process.
I tried to repair the hal.dll by
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm, but didn't have any
success. The best I accomplished was an attempt to boot, failing, the PC
automatically rebooting and starting the sequence all over again, and again,
and again....

I then loaded up XP Pro from my CD in order to gain access to the system.
That created a new entry in the boot.ini file making it look like a
dual-booting system, so I had to edit out the original line referring to the
XP Home Edition that came with the PC. So now I can see the D drive and all
the recovery files there, but have no idea on how to put them to use. I
build my own PC's and haven't bought a "store" PC in many, many years. So
now I'm at a loss on what to do here. Any help would be appreciated.

David...

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Why am I even posting at this hour??? <sigh>

It's been a long night trying to get my parents PC working. It an HP
Pavilion 733n and it's been exhibiting a lot of problems lately. So I
brought it home tonight with the intent to fix it. The bottom line is
this... The system recoveries didn't work, and there's no utility to create
a bootable CD from the recovery partition, which is the D drive, and there
were no recovery CD's provided with the PC to start with.

The problem is, after I used the restore utility (by pressing F10 at the
blue HP screen) I couldn't boot because of a bad or missing hal.dll and
probably because of all the files that failed during the extraction process.
I tried to repair the hal.dll by
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm, but didn't have any
success. The best I accomplished was an attempt to boot, failing, the PC
automatically rebooting and starting the sequence all over again, and again,
and again....

I then loaded up XP Pro from my CD in order to gain access to the system.
That created a new entry in the boot.ini file making it look like a
dual-booting system, so I had to edit out the original line referring to the
XP Home Edition that came with the PC. So now I can see the D drive and all
the recovery files there, but have no idea on how to put them to use. I
build my own PC's and haven't bought a "store" PC in many, many years. So
now I'm at a loss on what to do here. Any help would be appreciated.

David...

- What exactly is this HP restore function? Does it restore
the disk to its factory condition?
- You write that you now have a working version of WinXP.
What else are you trying to recover?

 

[DavidJ726]

Good Morning Pegasus,

Yes, the recovery process restores the PC to factory defaults. The working
version I was able to install is my personal copy so it cannot remain
installed on the HP.

So not only do I need to recover the copy of XP on the HD, the recovery
process also restores the drivers needed for the "integrated multi-media"
keyboard which is the only way to control speaker volume, etc... drivers
for integrated components such as the modem, NIC, Video, etc... and other
things mom wants back such as the HP help files, the CD burning software
that came with the HP, etc...

So it's not only an issue of functionality, but also of cost. I'm sure I
could find the necessary hardware drivers, but HP's web site indicates that
I need the original load to have the keyboard functionality. So Id need to
buy a new keyboard for her. I'd also need to purchase another copy of XP,
and I'd need to buy something better than than what comes with XP in order
to burn CD's.

David...