Compaq Recovery Partition
Everything from the OS disk is located on a hard drive recovery partition. With HP or Compaq you access recovery on restart by hitting the F10 key. You can recover applications, drivers, and the operating system to their factory shipped condition. You will need to reinstall and reconfigure any application that you installed, but it will not delete data files in its normal default mode.
Even though this recovery software takes up almost 600MB on average of the hard drive, it still requires cdrom discs be inserted into the machine to perform the actual recover.
You should create a Recovery Disc. Compaq allows you to create 1 set of recovery discs for your new computer. This is helpful in the event the recovery partition becomes corrupt or is accidentally deleted.
Compaq like other computer manufacturers have included a set of recovery discs with the purchase of a new computer in the past. In order to cut costs they new place a recovery partition on the hard drive, and give the customer the option of creating a set of recovery discs. Many customers never bother to create the recovery discs. Some of them never paid enough attention to realize it was an option. The practice of not including physical recovery media, actual recovery discs, is a bad practice in the industry and these computer manufacturers should ship actual recovery discs in the form of a DVD with the new computer system.
Contents
examples
Windows 7, HP Pavilion
During the time period both companies use multiple partitions on a Windows 7 install, one with the operating system work environment, and one with a restoration image, and a third small partition at the beginning of the drive, as visible using diskmgmt.msc within Windows.
- HP_RECOVERY (D:) NTFS 11.15GB System, Active, Primary
- OS (C:) NTFS 920.27GB Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary
- SYSTEM NTFS 100MB Primary
During a boot failure, it is sometimes assumed that the OS C: partition is missing the active flag, this is not the case. DO NOT SET THE OS C: to Active.
troubleshooting
I have a Compaq computer, but the recovery program says HP
Hewlett-Packard Company and Compaq Computer Corporation merged back in 2001. Sometimes a Compaq computer will have software labeled Hewlett-Packard (HP) and vice versa. Same company, different name, same software. Just use it.
I cant find the Create Recovery Disc Set tools
If PC Help & Tools is missing from the Start menu, and you cannot find the recovery utility, try browsing. If your computer came with Recovery disc software, you can browse to the file that opens the CD/DVD Creator software. Using Windows Explorer, search areas under the c:\windows folder. It is not under any of the HP or Hewlett-Packard directories in c:\Program Files. It is stuffed within the c:\windows folder in a subfolder. Here are some possibilities:
- c:\Windows\Creator\CD Creator.exe
- c:\Windows\SMINST\CD Creator.exe
If you still can't find it, search your entire drive for the program: "CD Creator.exe" using the Windows file search tool.
source: PC Desktop HP Pavilion a6700f soporte and Compaq Recovery Disk – Guide for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.
