So, I had to do a clone of someone's computer at work from a failing hard drive to a new one and during the transfer the data got a bit messed up, so I want to do a non-destructive system restore to see if that will repair the issue, problem is that after the clone hitting 'F10' on boot will no longer trigger the HP restore partition, so I want to know if there's a way to trigger it manually... It's basically a Windows Pe environment that should be able to be trigged with a modified boot.ini file, which is what I'm going to try tomorrow, failing that I'll have to call the customer, see if they have a restore disk, and failing that just reinstall from scratch....

I would do a repair install, but it doesn't work...

You havent said how badly xp is mangled so not sure what access youve still got to files etc. I think there should be a shortcut in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs,,in a subfolder with the internet links back to HP,My Hewlett Packard or system recovery or something like that,sorry to be so obscure,cant remember what the folders called,been a long time since ive had to do a similar repair on a HP..I think this shortcut points to c:\WINDOWS\SMINST\START.EXE,if this is true for your machine this may work(might need to run from dos)

c:\WINDOWS\SMINST\START.EXE /RUN

If f10 or f11 keys are not working the custom written HP MBR may have become mangled.so recovery from the hidden partition may be impossible.

As youve cloned the drive it should be possible to unhide the hidden partition with partition magic or something similar to recover drivers etc or possibly start the recovery from within the hidden partition,would suggest you clone the clone before trying anything,also back up the wpa.dll (machines activated status) oembios.bin,oembios.dat and oem bios.sig from C:\WINDOWS\system32 and be aware that the license no on the case may not be the no that HP used to install the system with so get the TRUE no with belarc advisor or rockxp first.If youre really lucky you will have a c:\I386 folder which you can copy off and save to make youre own reinstall disc,,acquire a copy of home or pro or whatever is installed,replace the I386 on the cd with yours then after repair or reinstall using the TRUE license no copy back your backed up wpa.dll in safe mode..

best o luck with it