Resolved Unable to access Recovery Partition

I have a problem with my laptop HDD that I cannot resolve. On booting the message "Disk read error press Ctrl + Alt + Del .." appears. First off I ran Seatools for DOS and the advanced scan revealed a number of LBAs that were repaired. I do not know if these were in the unallocated or the other two partitions. Windows 7 32bit Disk Management identifies the 120GB Hard Disk and showed 3 partitions. The First is called Recovery Partition 5.58GB, second is Primary Partition 68.71 GB and the third was unallocated 37.5GB. I formatted this partition 37.5GB NTFS and it is now New Volume and reads and writes to it are fine, so I know that there is nothing wrong with the HDD electronics.

If I right click on the Primary Partition the properties show 0 bytes and options to format, delete, change drive letter etc. However if I right click on the Recovery Partition, all I get is "Help ". I cannot access either the Recovery or Primary partition using a File Manager such as Windows Explorer.

Can anyone suggest a program that I can obtain to access, recover and copy over the files from the Recovery Partition in order to replace the operating system on another HDD? Or any other method apart from buying another copy of Windows OS?

The laptop is an HP Compaq 6910p. And no, I did not have the opportunity to make any recovery disks and I do not know how the Recovery and Primary Partitions were damaged. It was not my laptop initially!

 

Did you try going to Start\All Programs\Recovery Manager. Also when you first Boot the machine you will get the HP Splash screen. If you press Esc during the HP splash screen it will take you to a startup screen menu. Did you create recovery disks. Try Control Panel\Recovery\Restore your Files or Advanced recovery Methods.

 

Thank you for your very rapid responses, Steve and Ij50.

I have no idea whether HP in the UK will send me another OS dvd as in the past I have found that once a device is out of warranty, they are just not interested. They honestly seem to believe that if a device fails after warranty, then chuck it away and buy another. The HP Compaq 6910p is a 'business' laptop and judging by the dates on the manual pdfs, first came out almost 10 years ago, and my laptop ROM date is 2008, so my laptop is well out of warranty. I did say that it previously belonged to someone else. It originally came with Vista installed but had been upgraded to Windows 7. I do not know if 32 or 64 bit as I have never been able to get the laptop to boot.The splash screen does not include any option for recovery. There is a Boot Menu, Network option and one other. The very scanty BIOS information merely gives system hardware information.

I am well aware that one should make recovery disks as soon as one takes possession of a new OS these days, but in order to do that, it is necessary to have the PC operating. This one does not boot to the operating system, a startup option or any other option to get the OS running, facts that I thought I had explained in my original post. I put the HDD into a PC and so obtained the information quoted in my original post.

This laptop is not my main laptop. Please see My System.

 

For what it's worth, I created two extra partitions on my C drive, and by doing so, I lost access to my recovery partition. Dell said it had something to do with overwriting the master boot record (MBR).

They sent me a Windows 7 DVD, as they said it was impossible for me to re-access the recovery partition.

 

A set of Recovery disks are around $16.00 in the US. Can you access the advanced boot options. On start up press F8. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/...tup-options-including-safe-mode#1TC=windows-7

 

James and Ij50 - Many thanks for your suggestions. I will investigate the cost/availability of a set of recovery disks in the UK, but am not holding my breath. I can assure you all that I did nothing to this laptop - it was sold to me as a duff budgie and I am just trying to restore it to working order at minimum cost. I have bought a PSU and a 250GB HDD for it and if I have to, I will bite the bullet and buy a new OS. I am not sure that it will make cost, but I help silver surfers and one of them might need a laptop.

 

You might give TestDisk a try.

 

Thanks very much for the tip, Doc. This looks like a very possible solution. I will try it as soon as I get my PSU - battery is flat! Should have some results by Monday pm.

 

Well I got my PSU and tried a number of utility programs to recover the lost partitions. Partition manager did not want to know and eventually I used FDISK and deleted what I hoped were the Primary and Main partitions, leaving the recovery partition alone. Still no joy, so I thought, why not just try and install Windows 7 Home Premium.

Using a 32 bit copy that I legally own, and have the 64 bit on my main laptop, I started the install thinking that I would be told the media was unusable. None of it - the program installed without any hiccups, and I used the COA from the sticker on the 6910p laptop and am now in the process of installing SP1 and all the other updates. I have 104GB of usable disk space, so am a happy bunny. I do not have the recovery sector but then I do not need it now anyway. I believe it would have been Vista - ugh!

Thanks for the tips about alternative software and other sources; I shall make a note for future reference.

 

You're welcome. And great to hear you got her up and running again.

 

Congratulations great job.

 

I am afraid I was a bit previous! The HDD did not last a restart. It is now junk! New Install going okay. Lesson here is: at the first signs of disk failure, replace immediately.

 

The main thing is you got it going. Thanks for letting us know the resolution.

 

I think one thing that I have learned from this episode is that Seatools for Dos does not seem able to cure LBA errors. Of course it says it has 'repaired' the bad sectors, but there is really no great detail. I do remember that Nortion Utilities had some very useful tools but I do not know of any modern equivalent to the disk editor. I have no doubt that there are gurus out there who do know of programs, but they probably cost an arm and a leg and are used by the data recovery firms.

When I first started with digital computers in the 80's, I built a double 5.25 inch floppy disk drive unit using a Z80, clocked at 1MHz, ( I loved the Z80 assembly language ) and used a variation of the standard IBM sector format. With the NU Disk Editor it was possible to read from and write to the disk directly, and also to see if there were any errors in boot sectors etc. This unit was attached through a standard centronics type parallel i/o and I wrote/adapted the software myself. The program also defragged the floppies by moving files to fill the gaps and the capacity was 720kbytes each. I built the TTL based hardware on veroboard and it was all handwired and plugged into a wired back plane bus! In those days it was a great improvement over the popular tape storage using audio tapes, and a lot faster! Unfortunately all this went west when I started using IBM PCs in business. Too old now to get involved in the hardware and I don't think I could find my way around a modern motherboard circuit diagram with all the integrated circuitry. I would stilll like to be able to find my way around a BIOS firmware and the basic i/o used by Microsoft. I just hate X86 assembly!

I apologise if I have tended to ramble on, its an age thing... anyway the laptop is working fine now, and all I have to do is get a new battery and replace the DVD-ROM with a DVD/RW. All in hand.