Reimaging A Laptop

By OMG_Splitshadow on January 16, 2010 5:12:15 PM from

My sister went off to college with a new HP laptop, and of course, within a month she broke it. When she came back from Christmas, I reimaged it from the system recovery partition, but it went back to rolling restarts within 2 days. So, I reimaged it again with the same result 2 days later.

So, I divined that it was a hard drive problem, ran diagnostics, which failed, and called up HP. After ~2 hours with some indian guy who knew about 25 words of English, I got them to send me a hard drive. I replaced the hard drive and sent them back the broken one.

The hard drive was blank, so I ordered a reimage disk. The instructions said to restart the computer with the disk in the drive and it would automatically boot from the CD. Now, I've reimaged many computers, and that didn't sound right to me, but I tried it. It booted to a screen saying there was no OS installed, like I thought, so I went to boot options (F9), and selected boot from CD. It loaded up normally, ran a prompt that said it was determining the partition drive letter, then it restarted and started loading from the CD again. The instructions said that error screens and restarts may happen, which seemed quite odd, but I let it run overnight. It was still restarting the next day.

So my question to you, is, am I doing something wrong? Or did HP send me a bad recovery disk?

(I made sure it was disk 1 of 2, and it is booting from the CD)

+29 Karma | 2 Replies

why aren't you using the original computer's recovery cd's which you should have made 2 seconds after turning it on the first time?

A. Not my computer

B. My sister doesn't know anything about computers

C. I thought she wouldn't screw the hard drive over so much it would need replacing

D. Why doesn't HP supply recovery disks like they should?

E. How do your insults, disguised by a thin veil of questions, help my situation?

D. Why doesn't HP supply recovery disks like they should?

No one supplies recovery discs anymore. It's all done with recovery drives. When you get a new computer, it is wise to make a set of discs, which is allowed only once. Thereafter, the PC won't let you make another set.

E. How do your insults, disguised by a thin veil of questions, help my situation?

I don't think Doc was being insulting....his bedside manner may be a bit sharp, but he means well.

As for your problem, sounds like you did everything right. I just put a new hard drive in my laptop, ran the recovery discs I made when I bought it, all is well. Maybe the discs they sent were bad, or for a different PC? Mistakes do happne.

Dang pigeons!!

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Reimaging A Laptop