Restoring HP laptop to the factory state

Restoring your HP laptop to the factory state

(When boot loader is deleted, in other words  when F11 doesn't work)

NOTE 

I have written this tutorial in a way that some people might not understand, if you don't understand don't follow the tutorial because it might make your computer go to a state where you cannot use it at all.

Remember what ever you do, back up your data before starting the process

Background to the problem

After 2 sent backs costing almost a month my HP machine was finally repaired.

In the communication process I found out that, if you don't send the HP laptop in the original factory state, they will consider it as a breaking of warranty conditions (GREAT!!!).

So if you hadn't created recovery disks, and if you lost your boot loader because you installed another copy of windows or if you have installed linux (even Ubuntu with WUBI). Your boot up or recovery keys like F11 might not work. 

So, now you have to use the recovery partition to restore the machine to the factory settings, but how do you access the recovery partition ?

Well,

Strategy

The strategy here is to create a separate partition, copy the content of the recovery partition to the and set it as the ACTIVE partition, once you do that, it’ll make the computer boot from that partition, Thus making the recovery process start.

Necessary items

You will need a bootable windows CD or some sort of a boot up disk to go to a terminal (or a command prompt) remember, you can’t do this when you are inside windows, you have to boot from a separate disk.

Process

1.       Make sure all the folders are visible, if not go to folder options and make all the files even hidden files and machine files visible. (in your recovery partition otherwise how can you copy paste?)

2.       If you don’t already have a partition you have to create a new partition

3.       If you are using windows vista or 7

       right click on computerà manageàdisk management

4.       Using the disk management tool create a new partition large enough to keep the stuff of the recovery partition

5.       Now copy all the stuff of recovery partition to the newly created partition ( make sure they look exactly the same)

6.       Now, load the bootable disk and boot the computer using them ( a windows DVD or a boot disk)

7.       Go to a command prompt

8.       Now, what you have to do is find the find the relevant disk, find the relevant partition and make it active

9.       The commands you will be are the following

A.      diskpart ( this will move for the disk partitioning )

B.      list disk (displays a list of disks available)

C.      select disk 0 (use one of the numbers from list disk)

D.      list partition (displays a list of available partitions)

E.       list partition 1 (select the appropriate partition)

F.       active (this will make the partition active)

G.     exit ( exit from partition)

H.      exit ( exit from disk)

 10.       Now, just restart the computer and it will boot from the newly created active partition.

Hope this helps 

cheers