I got an hp pavilion for free now am seeing why, they said that it just needed rebooting and gave me the recovery disks. When you turn it on, it says no operating system or recovery partion corrupt. When you put the first recovery disc in, it takes off but only runs for a second and the progress bar goes up a bit and says creating recovery partion, wait. I wait and wait and wait but that is where it freezes up. I was told that maybe the hard drive was bad so I replaced it with a new one and got the same thing again. I replaced the dvd player and got the same thing. I checked the ram sticks one at a time as it has 1 gig in 2 512 sticks.
At one point it said cde/dvd read error. The first disk is pretty scratched. Do you think that I need to get a better copy of the backup disks or does this sound symtomatic of another problem, I just have no idea and any suggestions would be appreciated. It is windows xp and I do have access to another copy of the recovery disks if this sounds like the next thing to try. Any help will be appreciated, thank you in advance.
Ron
Another test (cheap) is to download (for free) a Linux 'Live CD' such as Puppy, or a.n.other, there's quite a few of them. Then burn to a cd and see if it boots (no need to install it, just use it to prove if the cd runs), that would rule out your recovery discs at being faulty.. (
