How to reinstall using hidden partition?

Okay, so...

I have an HP dv2050us computer, trying to get it back to factory fresh state (after unfortunately the person who got it paid compuseless to install Windows XP Pro on it (rather than just getting the upgrade and doing it herself))

But, it seems to be very hard to do, I've tried going through the reinstall and it claims to work, but then won't boot (gives MBR Boot error?) I've tried installing XP Pro fresh, the first time it worked but ended up saying the PC had 256MB of RAM not 2GB of ram, every other time it just won't even boot (starts trying to boot windows and then gives blue screen of death with a 0x0000007B error (boot device error?) is this machine just screwed?

Now I'm trying taking out the partition, and seeing if the HP Recovery partition will recreate partitions (This machine seems to have the following, an HP recovery partition (10GB or so, FAT32 formated) a 1GB NTFS partition? and then the rest (when it came) was in a NTFS partition.

 

Update:

Okay first off the recovery partition seems to ONLY work if you delete off the "C" partition, while the HP recovery was claiming to reformat and create the recovery partition, it didn't seem to actually be doing it correctly, and was ending up with a bad hard drive that you couldn't boot off.

Removing the partition (thanks to my handy dandy boot USB key) allowed me to the get the recovery program to re-create the partition which it correctly did and then the machine was fine *phew*.

 

Try to do the install again but before you do go into Bios and disable native SATA. Good luck. I hope they have the restore disks. It took my DV8000T about five and half hours to restore the factory settings. Before doing the reset ,turn off native SATA and see if it starts windows. If it does try and install the chipset drivers in the steps listed in the reinstall thread.

 

Well SATA was disabled, and f'ing compuseless hadn't bothered to make restore disks (stupid gits). At this point I'm happy because the machine is booting into XP Home which, while not perfect and not what she paid for, at least it works!

SATA drivers in the bios are off by default, so that seems okay, I'm going to see if later I can do a "upgrade" to XP Pro without wiping the hard drive, however before I do anything I want to make the backup CD/DVD's, of course I'm not happy that you need 3 DVD's to do the backup, seems excessive, my Acer only needed 1 DVD and that was with all the bloatware, the HP seems to have a LOT of bloatware on it just from my quick look around, lots of trial programs.