Asus Recovery CD does not work

Hello everybody,

i have an Asus A6vM notebook. These days it's quite an old one

Last week I bouht myself an external HD because the internal Hd is to small of capacity.

And in meantime I decided to format my HD and repartition it and reinstall windows xp home. Since i live during the year on my dorm at university, i never thought of such things as 'recovery cd an HD'. So during the format i deleted ALL the partitions, and made only 1 new one. (i deleted the recovery hd )
And I reinstalled xp home, from a winsdows cd I got from a friend of mine.

But my OS doesnt run as i wanted, i had trouble with acitivating it with my original code from my pc, so I had to find an other one and after a lot of hours and callng to microsoft, i was able to activate the Os, but with a different key, and it rusn bad, and it does not install the service packs...

So i decided to reinstall it again, now that I'm home, with the recovery disc.

But, when I restart my notebook with the recovery disc inside, it just does not boot from it, even by using ESC, or by altering the boot sequence in the BIOS..
What should I do?

 

Make sure you insert the first recovery disk (if it's a CD usually there will be two, and only the first may be bootable). Also there is a 3rd CD which contains drivers and utilities. Make sure you know what disk you're working with and when.

Does your optical unit read the recovery CD in Windows? The CD itself may be scratched or otherwise unreadable. Does it read or boot from other CDs? The unit itself may be bad.

 

I got 3 cds
Two of them ar the recovery ones, en its writin on them which one is the first, so those are not mixed up. And utilitys driver, is different looking, and when i insert that one before rebooting, it actually boots from it
It says' starting wind xp preinstallition environment'
but when entering windows it starts dos, and then a box appears saying: 'System does not ready for preinstallation. please Recovery Pure OS first.
Please eject CD from the device and press OK to restart.'
So i press OK, but it gets stuck

Whats actually quite funny i noticed,is when the pc boots from the utility cd, it boots windows XP PRo... whilst my key is for a XP home...

AND
When I alter my BIOS boot sequence to only cd/dvd, and i boot with the first recovery cd, it says 'Reboot and Select proper Boot device or insert Boot Media in selected boot device and press a key'

so a press a key, and I can hear it reading the recov cd, but then the same thing appears.... over and over...

AND
yes it can read the cd in windows..

any ideas ?

 

Given your information, I think the 1st CD may have gone bad/unbootable.

It is possible that the damage is not that severe and the CD may be readable on a better optical drive.

In this case, you could try to make an image of this CD, either on the same machine (where it's doubtful that it would work given that it doesn't boot) or on a new desktop with a good optical drive, which may be able to read the CD better than your laptop's drive. Then burn the ISO on a new CD, and see if you can use the copy instead.

If all else fails, you can try to order a copy of the recovery CDs (I am not sure that's possible though, since they contain a Windows installation; but you could call the service center and ask anyway).

 

I checked it on a different pc and it shows the same content...

Btw, i noticed that the first of the 2 recov discs, is a DVD and the second one is a CD...

maybe that has something to do with it...

anyway, i guess i better call the asus help line tomorrow

thx for helping me

 

Yes, but maybe the area of the CD (or DVD) where the boot code is located has gone bad. That is not readily apparent when you look at the CD (DVD) under Windows. Additionally, there is a chance that the area is not totally ruined, just more difficult to read; a newer drive with better error correction might be able to read it.

That is why I suggested you try making an image out of the CD (or DVD, whatever) on a newer computer. It is possible (although not at all sure) that you recover full functionality of the recovery disks.