I have a Hewlett Packard desktop computer that did not come with any type of recovery disks or Windows installation disks. However, it did of course come with a recovery partition. While I was moving around partitions, I did something very stupid that annihilated my NTFS partition that contained my Windows XP Pro operating system. I have managed to extract all of my files from that partition, but for the most part it is beyond repair. There are too many damaged files for it to be able to boot. I do, however, have the recovery partition completely intact. It has all of its files with absolutely no errors at all.
When I boot the computer I should be able to press F10 and start the recovery process. However, pressing F10 does absolutely nothing. Before this crisis I would press F10 every now and then just to see what would happen. The recovery screen would come up, just as expected. That no longer occurs. I have no idea why it will not start the recovery process. I have made sure that the recovery partition has the EXACT same parameters as it did when the computer came out of the factory. It occupies the exact same number of bytes, it is positioned on the hard drive exactly as it should be, it has the proper FAT32 file system, it is the correct partition ID (hda1), and it even has the correct partition label “HP_RECOVERY” but for some reason the BIOS (So I assume) will not detect it to start the system recovery.
Does anyone have any idea what I can do? Is there some way I can create recovery disks from this intact recovery partition? I was stupid enough not to make the Windows recovery disks from the HP Recovery CD Creator while I still had a working Windows XP. I also have Linux operating system on this same computer, so I can do nearly everything you can do in Windows, I just need some ideas.
