A friend has asked me to help with his HP laptop. It was running Vista but had problems and another 'friend' has helpfully deleted the C: partition while attempting to reinstall. The HP Recovery partition is still there and still appears to contain data (based on used disk space - I haven't browsed it yet). Is there a way I can get into this and do a rebuild? I'm hoping - at the moment - that if I use a Vista recovery disk I can get to some kind of command prompt or at least have the opportunity to search the recovery partition for I386 or whatever. Does any know if a product ID will be needed or will it be unattended from a recovery partition build? If this isn't possible, any other ideas? Unfortunately he's got absolutely no discs of any kind - not even a boot recovery. Jon
I'm a bit (well quite a lot) reluctant to start pulling HDDs and I don't really see the need in this case. The laptop boots OK and will boot off a system CD so surely I should be able to work from that position with the HDD in place. Jon