-_- so I accidentally did a System Restore

So my computer just arrived yesterday from HP

I was following some of the guides here on these forums, and I accidently continued with a System Restore.

Now, when the computer turns on, after the HP screen, the screen goes black and has a blinking text line on the top left for about 15 seconds, then it loads another black screen that says 'windows is loading files' and it would take about 2 minutes to load, and then the screen would go black again, and then the normal Vista scrolling bar screen would come on.

After this, the screen would turn blue and the HP Recovery Manager would come on. It says that it will help me restore my settings back to its original factory condition (which is fine with me, since I only got the computer yesterday).

Now, it's asking me for a Factory Image Recovery. "this will format the entire hard drive and all data will be lost." I don't have any data that i'd like to save from the computer, so I don't mind.

However, I do not have a Windows Vista Recovery disk or an upgrade disk or anything like that.

So what do I do?

 

When you first turn on your HP notebook, it asks if you wish to create a recovery disk, you might be able to do it later, but I'm not sure.

Running the restore will take everything back to factory setting without the need of a disk.

Once the restore is done, I highly recommend that you create a restore disk incase something happens to the restore partition.

 

The restore will run off the restore partition on your hard disk, so you don't need the discs for it. I agree that you should burn the discs as soon as you get the system restored. Make sure to have DVD+R discs (note the plus +). The -R discs don't always work correctly.

 

... unless that hard drive fails which happened to me last week on a brand new HP desktop. Burn the recovery DVD's and have a favorite magazine/book handy while you wait; one day you may find that it was time well spent. (And BTW, the set of recovery disks are keyed to your computer so they will only work on the computer from which they are burnt.)

FWIW - one other lesson, if you have added a second hard drive and run recovery, if the recovery can't find the first disk (my C: completely died) it will recover to the second disk... yes, I lost nearly 500GB of data! The recovery program doesn't tell you on what drive it will recover so disconnect any other drives you have before running recovery.

 

If the Hard Drive fails then you would send the laptop back to HP because you wouldn't be able to install anything on it. I think you meant the partition got corrupted, because the recovery partition is always a partition of the system HDD.

Anyways, it will run off of your recovery partition. Just make sure you burn yourself the recovery disks once you reinstall the OS.

 

In my case it was a brand new HP desktop and the drive was dead... but I thought this info might be helpful as the dv9500... er, 9700?... has an option for two hard drives.

 

Yes, but we're talking about this guy's specific problem, not in general. But that problem is also why I said to burn the discs once the system is back up and running.

Good advice and something to watch out for. But why didn't it find the first disk?

 

I have no idea why the first HD failed. The drive was a WD5000AKS in a brand new custom m9000t (Q6600, 2 GT RAM, nVIDIA 8500 w/512).

Beyond transferring files I was also running some comparrison tests against an HP m8277 (E6750, 4GB RAM, 8400GS) rendering video and "burning" to an 8.5GB folder. I did a clean reboot on each machine and the m9000t opened with a black screen stating "BOOTMGR is missing."

BTW, on the one test completed the difference between the two was:

Q6600: 2 hrs 1 min
E6750: 2 hrs 15 mins

Not a huge difference but as the custom m9000t Q6600 was cheaper than the m8277 w/E6750 with the recent 30% off coupon I am content.

 

You won't notice a big difference between the two when you are just transferring files, there's just not a lot of CPU usage for there to be any big difference. I just built a desktop and have a similar config to yours, I have a Q6600 (which I'm going to overclock to 3.0 Ghz), 4GB of RAM, 8800 GTX, 2x 500GB Sata 3.0 HDDs, and all the small parts. I mean why spend a ton more money for the high clocked dual cores, or a little higher clocked Q6700, when you can just overclock the Q6600 and get the same speeds?

Can you overclock your CPU in your desktop, or does it restrict you?

 

Envision, just to be clear I was referring to activities prior to the HD failing... wasn't expecting performance enhancement when transferring files. Was pretty shocked that the HD failed in fact the other drive is a WD7500AKS which - knock on wood - has been terrific.

I haven't tried overclocking and don't even know how or if it would be worth it... the most taxing tasks will be video editing, rendering, etc. which is what I wanted to compare. Was thinking about upgrading the memory to PC6400 from PC5300 but doubt that would make much of a difference... any thoughts?

After researching thought the Quad was the way to go especially with the discount so other than the HD failure (which was covered by HP) very happy with the machine and set-up.

 

I definitely love the Quad core and think that it's the way to go as well. I know that not many programs are written to truly take advantage of the 4 cores, but I don't see that taking too long to happen. The great thing about Vista compared to XP is that it independently manages the multiple cores. In XP it only balanced the load between multiple cores (so all the cores would be at the same load), but with Vista you can have one core at 55%, while another is at 100%, which is great.

I don't know how big of a difference you will see, but here's a couple facts that might interest you. The Q6600 runs stock at a FSB of 1066Mhz, the RAM you currently have in there is 667Mhz. This means that even though your CPU is limited to talking to the RAM at the 667Mhz speed. If you went up to the PC6400 it would up it to 800Mhz, which I could see making a small difference.

Also, I don't know if you are capable of overclocking with your machine, but if you purchased the PC6400, you should be able to overclock it to 1066Mhz with no problem at all, that will take out the bottleneck between your CPU and RAM. This again, is only possible if you can overclock your RAM with your computer.