Making Another set of Recovery Disks

I'm using a HP Pavilion dv5-1102tx Entertainment Notebook. I bought this notebook at the end of January 2009.

After reading many threads telling me to create recovery disks, I decided to create a set for myself. "Yay!" I said to myself when the process was all done.

Then, I went to the drivers/software download page for my laptop, and lo and behold, I found a patch that, quote "corrects the information that is burned to the User Created Recovery Disc (UCRD)." unquote.

The link is here: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&os=2093&product=3805927

Now, seeing as I can't create another set of recovery disks, I have 2 questions:

1) Is there a way for me to make the computer allow me to burn another set of recovery disks after I installed the patch?

2) Do I need to install the patch at all?

 

I was looking at this earlier on HP's site for my dv9535nr. Look's like you'll have to contact them, or bump that downloaded patch to a USB or external drive. Then run your patch from one of those locations after using the disks. I wish HP was more specific on what info it corrects!

NOTE: If you have already burned your User Created Recovery Disc, this patch is not required. Customers who have already burned their UCRD should contact HP Support to request a replacement recovery disc that includes the correct location for the Recovery Partition.

 

1) Yes!

How can I make another set of Recovery Discs?

For whatever reason, you were not able to successfully create recovery discs for the first time, or you lost the ones you made. Now the software won't let you burn another set. To fix this, open an explorer window (my computer, etc..) and go into folder options. Make sure "Hide protected operating system files" is not checked, and also make sure "Show hidden files and folders" is enabled. Then do a search for the file “hpcd.sys” on all local disk drives. Delete all of the ones that you find or rename them, for example, to “hpcd.bak”.

Additional notes:
Do what is indicated in the above paragraph. Search may not find the “hpcd.sys” file(s). In case it doesn’t, on my system one instance of “hpcd.sys” is located in the root of the D:\HP_RECOVERY partition and the second in C:\Windows\SMINST\. It's necessary to rename/delete them both!

2) Apparently the recovery partition is not located in the correct place if the patch is not applied and you perform a recovery using the disks you made. You could contact HP as requested and they would probably send you disks or perform Step 1 above, apply the patch and then burn another set of disks.

 

I plan to create the recovery set and then restore it to my new 60GB SSD. I was wondering if this is possible? Does system recovery on a brand new disk create the recover partition? If yes, then I'm out of luck... HP does not include a version of Vista on the system that I can cleanly install. Seems like I read a lot of posts of people wanting to find one. Sadly, I don't have a friend that has one.

Doh!
Gnimble