Help Me. Laptop Messed Up.

Hello

I have a thinkpad which is supposed to have a recovery partition.

Now because of grub and all that stuff i've messed up my partition table.

Recover to factory contents says file not found and returns me to a d:\recovery prompt.

Partition magic says INIT failed error 117. could not get drive letters .

Now i am stuck.

Now my questions are

Can i recover my system from recovery or not
2) Have i unknowingly modified my recovery partition.
3) How do i recover my system
4) If i really have lost my recovery partition, is it the end of the world. I mean cant i install windows anymore with a normal winxp cd.

Currently i can boot into windows.

Fdisk says i have one partition of ntfs. I have deleted all others.
PLZ HELP.

 

After you used GRUB, the recovery partition is somehow useless. It probably won't recognize any recovery special key, just because GRUB rewrite the boot sector. Recovery key is just for XP boot sector, not for GRUB. I just mess up my HP, and can't start any recovery although I am 120% sure I didn't touch any thing about that recovery partition.

I end up with reinstall everything, and get 10GB free space from that recovery partition. Since it does nothing, why keep it.

 

If you have your XP disc, pop it in when you boot. On the BIOS bootscreen, press F2 or F8 or F12 or whatever to choose what device to boot from. Choose the optical drive to boot from.

Follow the instructions to access the Recovery console (press R at the main menu), select the 1)C:\Windows partition and enter the command "fixmbr" to rewrite the Master Boot Record. Enter the command "exit" to leave the console and restart. Your XP partition should start up correctly.

EDIT: woops I just noticed from your post that Windows is running OK. Sorry, didn't read correctly. So, Windows no longer recognizes the recovery partition? Was this partition in NTFS/FAT32 to start with?

 

There is probably something useful on Thinkwiki...
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_recover_the_preloaded_OS