Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

Isabella · Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 100

I have an HP Laptop that I purchased about a year and a half ago. A relative came over and stayed a few days with us and ever since Windows XP has been acting oddly. Even doing a system restore with windows built in feature has not helped. As I've done in the past I backed up everything I needed and got ready to format and re-install everything. Well upon putting the Windows CD into the DVD/RW drive that it came with windows normally would pop up with the auto run menu, this time it did not. So I just rebooted as normal since the BIOS is already set to boot from CD first, well it went right back into windows. After checking the BIOS to verify it was set to boot from CD first, I went back into windows and checked my computer. It shows the DVD drive, but it just acts as if no disc is inserted. It does the same with any CD/CDR/DVD as well. I beleive the disc isn't spinning at all. Normally you could hear the disc spin up, but now it does nothing. I've removed the drive and re-inserted it, and it did nothing. I also checked the driver and windows says its installed and functioning properly.

Although this is a pain, its not my problem I'm working on now. Replacing the drive isn't really a possibility right now so I'm trying to setup something a bit unusual. I remember some of the older HP and Dell computers have a hidden partition used for recovery purposes, and everyone disliked it since they no longer got and CDs. I'm wanting to setup something similar on my laptop now. I have partition Magic 8 and Boot Magic 7 installed and would like to have the recovery partition setup to boot straight to a DOS prompt and then just load the setup file from the files copied over from the CD that came with the computer. I have a wireless network and already have the stuff copied to the computer.

Whenever I setup the partition boot magic just hangs at setting up your computer and nothing loads. I've tried copying the files from a windows 98 boot disk onto the partitions root and placing the XP CD contents in its own folder, but it still will not boot. I've searched Google for a few days and can come up with nothing like this. I don't want to create a Image of my current OS to store there, I just like to be able to boot to that partition and load the installer just like having the CD in the drive (when it worked that is).

Hope that makes since, let me know if you need any other info. I consider myself a computer guru, but this one has me scratching my head.

Thanks