Erased the MBR - can't use F11 for Recovery

Hello. I have a Pavillion DV2000 with Vista. I was having trouble - it's a long story. I got to the point that when I booted all I got was a cursor on a black screen. Finally I looked at the MBR with a disk editor - the MBR has the F11 recovery message embedded in it. I copied the MBR to a floppy and did some other tinkering, then I went to copy the MBR back to the hard drive but I had lost the file. The partition table is OK - I just don't have the boot code from the original MBR. I tried a number of things, like trying to boot the recovery partition using different MBR code, but it doesn't work that way.

Because I don't have the original MBR code I have lost F11 access to the recovery partition.

I have a recovery DVD. I used that to start the system and it boots with the DVD and loads files for a few minutes just like it should when starting up with a recovery DVD. But then it says the computer doesn't support using the recovery disk. Apparently it sees the tinkering I did to the MBR and refuses to continue. I don't really know what's wrong about the DVD recovery method. I suspect if I had the original MBR code I could copy it to the MBR and then I could get my F11 capability back.

I'm certain the process to get F11 recovery capability back isn't all that difficult - I just don't know what I need.

Does anybody here know how the technicians get the recovery capability up and running when the system is broken like this?

TIA.

 

A friend of mine might have done a similar thing.
What I did was booting up a live CD (ubuntu gutzy gibbon in my case)
And flaged the recovery partition as bootable.
This helped in my case. the installation reflagged it later.
I don't know if this is suitable for you in your case but my logic says it would.

 

Using Live CD is not the "official" way of fixing this (more like a trick)

If you have a recovery disc, you might want to use a third party program that formats the HDD, so the recovery disc can work.

In the worst case, I would advice the customer that I will back up the info on the HD and re-image the HDD with our huge library of recovery media from HP.

 

Thank you for your suggestion. One question I had: IS THE RECOVERY PARTITION BOOTABLE ? Based on what you say apparently it is. But my problem goes beyond that. I lost the original boot code in the MBR, so the bootstrap loader will never see the boot flag in the partition table.

I do have the recovery partition flagged as the boot partition. Although I lost the original boot code in the MBR, I copied boot code from a WinXP system to the MBR to see if that would boot the recovery partition. From what I can tell that code does run - but the recovery partition never boots.

I am going to approach this from a different angle by asking smaller questions in a new post.

 

I think I might get there if I had the boot code that was in the MBR. It apparently was some proprierary MBR code. It didn't have the standard error messages embedded in it. I looked at it with a disk editor. It had a message for an F11 prompt embedded in it - not the standard boot failure messages. I am going to approach the problem from a different angle. I think I can get F11 capability back if I have the original MBR code.

Possibly, when my HP/Vista realized it was broken it copied special MBR code to the drive making the only way forward be to hit F11 and use the recovery partition. But I tinkered with it instead and lost that only way out.

I'm going to post a different question - approach this differently.