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    Restoring F11 Restore

    Discussion in 'HP' started by John0877, Apr 22, 2008.

  1. John0877

    John0877 Newbie

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    friend of mine got an HP DV9743CT Laptop and he wanted XP on it instead of Vista. well in our efforts to do so we apparently screwed up the MBR and lost the F11 Restore access. he has since gone back and decided to not go forward with trying to get XP set up and running and wants to restore his laptop to factory spec. well upon trying to we found out F11 Restore no longer works.

    my plan is this:
    get another HP laptop that uses F11 for the restore program and has a restore partition on D (or whatever drive letter it is) and copy the Master Boot Record from it onto his laptop then just restart and hit F11 and get into the restore program.
    wold this work? if so would it also resore the Quick Play partition that we also deleted cause we figured whats this 1gb partition doing at the end of the drive. (hindsight not the smartest thing :p)

    any problems with this plan or is there another way of maybe manually reenabling access to the restore partition from the F11 button press? as it stands now pushing F11 leads into the BIOS, same with F2 and i think ESC or whatever other button options are there.

    we have contacted HP for getting a recovery disc set but that was weeks ago and hes frustrated with this. he just wants it working now.
    before trying to format while Vista was still on i tried making a recovery disc set as well but it would make the first one then during verification something wold go wrong or something then i would try it again and it kept starting from the beginning and would never make a full set of the 3 DVDs.

    please tell me this MBR idea will work :D
     
    John0877, Apr 22, 2008
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  2. umar

    umar Notebook Evangelist

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    i dunno abt this idea but when i formatted my lappy to clean install vista i also lost the F11 ability...but luckily i had created restore discs and that abled me to restore the original vista...lucky me...as soon as i restored the original factory installed vista i was able to use F11 again....
    my advice would be to get those recovery discs somehow
     
    umar, Apr 22, 2008
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  3. Harper2.0

    Harper2.0 Back from the dead?

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    i think the only thing you can do(if you've done a clean install) is to order recovery discs from hp.
     
    Harper2.0, Apr 22, 2008
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  4. John0877

    John0877 Newbie

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    well we got back into the F11 recovery program with hitting F11 but now when you hit Next to continue the recovery it pops up an error starting 0x000... something and told us to contact HP. freakin thing didnt even work after we went through the trouble. grrr
     
    John0877, Apr 23, 2008
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  5. umar

    umar Notebook Evangelist

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    sorry to hear that...gues the only thing u can do now is get the recovery discs
     
    umar, Apr 23, 2008
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