HP hidden partition

[genec]

My friend has a HP computer with XP Home and no restore disk, as that is the way HP wants it so they can sell him a recovery disk.
After searching their web site it says that "the recovery information is stored in a hidden space ( partition) on the hard drive." Question; is there a way to access that partition and then burn a recovery CD. If that is impossible does anyone know the price of the recovery CD?
Thanks Gene

 

[Zepper]

Have you gone to hp's web site and checked the FAQ's - always a good place to start?
.bh.

 

[Geniere]

A good reason not to buy brand name PC's. After replacing my Compaq system's hard drive, I had to use Compaq's restore disk to load the MoBo's drivers. It took about 5 hours to get rid of all the useless Compaq specific files.

Regards

 

[genec]

I have several hours at their web site and printed out some stuff that may help my friend, but aside from that there is nothing useful, and clicking on the FAQ link takes me to a download page. I also would not buy a preconfigured PC. Just trying to help someone that already did.

 

[Xanthguy]

You could try booting from a floppy and seeing if fdisk will reveal the partition. Maybe it's listed as unallocated space and you could try adding a drive letter so you could access the data. Don't know if it would work, but you could give it a look. Don't mess with it unless you're sure about what you're doing. Honestly, I wouldn't deal with it. Their hard drive is probably rigged (like some gateway computers i ran into) so that if you try to use anything other than their system restore disk it will tell you that you aren't allowed to run that CD on this computer.

I'd just bite the bullet, get the restore CD, and just have your friend build their own comp next time. Better, more fun, and sometimes cheaper.

--Xg

 

[genec]

That part about "being sure of what I am doing" tells me to forget it. Thanks folks, Gene: