hi i'm trying to get through all 11 pages, but there is to many post and links that are around my problem, so maybe someone may point me to right pages, post etc. (a straight away answer would be handy as well) so, the problem is: 1. it's not my laptop (hp pavilion, xp MCE) so I don't know what was installed/run. 2. I'm trying to do full recovery to factory settings 3. pc recovery from windows gives "recovery part could not be found" message 4. f11 starts pc recovery that is trying to make recovery part (it needs cd/DVD disks that weren't done) 5. f8 has no recovery option 6. making recovery part active changes nothing (normal boot to xp) 7. recovery part is visible, I made everything visible on partition using attrib. any help?