DescentBB

A friend has a two-year-old HP P6100Z that the hard drive is gone out on. So I am unable to get to the "restore" partition. Am I correct in assuming that there's no way to recover the operating system since they don't have a CD. And by the way it was running Vista.

HP sells recovery discs for fairly cheap (like $10). I would contact them with your model info.

But yeah, if your hard drive is toast, you lost the recovery partition.

My only problem would be to install Vista back on there. Well I'll give them the choice, thanks for the post.

The recovery discs from HP should include whatever Vista OS was installed when it was purchased.

Sorry, I wasn't clear, I think re-installing Vista is like giving someone an incurable disease.

Vista runs just fine if you give it a minimum of 4 GB of RAM (and stick to the 64 bit version).

And neither are the case with this machine.

I haven't taken it out and hooked it up to my computer to see if I can "see" the harddrive or it's fried. Luckily I helped them back up their docs to a flash drive about two weeks ago before they were having trouble and when I found out how much "precious" stuff they had with out a back.

Back up!
Back up!
Back up!

Side note to all who read this and purchase a new machine with no recovery media (recovery cd/dvd) as soon as you go thru all the welcome and register crap. There will be a program included usually under "brand name/utilities" to make backup recovery disk(s) run it and make some disks... It's a one time deal

Oem mfg's are only required by microsoft to provide 1 source of recovery, being cheap they tend to use a recovery partition instead of separate physical media. But at least they give you a chance to make your own

4 DVDs or 2 DVD/DL

Enjoy

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