stillife

Tripredacus, I've made some advances since my last post. I've been able to get F11 to boot into the recovery partition. However, I'm still not able to boot because of the BOOTMGR problem. I think the last issue for me to resolve is to be able to get the recovery partition to boot the winre.wim file. I'm new at this kind of thing and still haven't figured out how to boot the wim image. I've been thinking that maybe the best strategy is to mount the image and copy the files over to the recovery partition and then use BCD to start windows recovery environment. Any thoughts? As I said, I'm very new and don't have good grasp of most of this stuff yet so any insight will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ali

Hi all, Sorry to revive this old topic, but I'm trying to accomplish what others have discussed here. If the moderators or others feel it is better I start a new thread, I will of course do that. My situation is a bit different from the OP and some of the others who have posted with their problems. I have an HP 6730s and the recovery partition was already removed when I got the laptop. Since I had access to another HP laptop, I thought I could reactivate the recovery function by simply creating an NTFS primary partition and copying over the files from the other laptop's recovery partition. My goal is not to restore the factory recovery function (since I don't have the factory image on the HDD), but to allow a custom image to be written when there is a need to recover the system. I'm setting this computer up for my grandmother and I'm trying to create a method whereby she can just go back to the way the computer was set up with a few simple clicks. I thought that the built-in method would probably be the simplest to implement (although after reading through these posts I'm beginning to think there are probably easier methods). So here is what I've already done: 1) I created a primary NTFS partition named "HP_RECOVERY". 2) I copied the content of the recovery partition from another laptop into the partition. 3) Using a Windows PE + imagex CD, I made a WIM image of the windows partition and placed it at system.sav\util\HPFactory.wim 4) I edited the HPRM.ini file which has a listing of image indices and the partition where they should be copied to work with this new file 5) Using EasyBCD, I created a new boot loader entry of type "WIM Image (Ramdisk)" (it is on the WinPE tab) and linked it to the Recovery\WindowsRE\winre.wim file 6) After reboot I chose the new entry and Windows RE loaded up along with HP Recovery Manager. 7) I did a system restore and the program successfully wrote my new image back on the Windows partition. Now the problems 1) The F11 function doesn't work. Pressing F11 won't do anything and the HP recovery environment is not listed in the boot options (there is a blank line between F10 and F12). From what I've read in this thread, HP's custom MBR is required to get this to work, am I right? 2) Setting the recovery partition to active and trying to boot directly into the partition won't work either. It says "BOOTMGR is missing." Again, from what I've read, I need a proper boot sector instruction that loads the WinRE image. Given the above, I want to know what is the next step? I was thinking that I could copy over the recovery partition boot sector from the other laptop and maybe then I'll be able to at least boot directly into the recovery partition. If that works I have the option to either copy the MBR from the other laptop and give it a try or use Tripredacus' method and try and catch F11 in the MBR and then boot into the recovery partition. But is this all sound? Am I missing something? I'm very new to all this and I will likely need some help in trying to copy the proper sectors. Any help is greatly appreciated. Kind regards, Ali PS: I haven't attached any files because I'm not sure which files are most handy. Let me know and I'll post the requried files.