I started having trouble booting with my HP laptop the other day. I kept being sent to the repair screen and getting the unexpected error message (similar to some of the screen shots posted here). So, I tried the easy method on the Wiki to try to recover the boot partition. That didn't work. So I tried the manual force method on the Wiki. That worked to a point. Now when I try to boot I get an error that winload.exe cannot be found. I have ordered recovery disks from HP and they will be here Monday. I borrowed a friend's Win 7 disks to see if I could boot from the CD drive. That worked to a certain point. I got back to the HP Recovery manager where there are options for reinstalling windows, running ChkDsk, and opening a command prompt (I used this the other day to run ChkDsk per the Wiki suggestions). I opened a command prompt and starting looking around. Previously, all my files were on C with the recovery partition being D. It looks like the recovery partition is now X. C seems to be empty (when I do a DIR, all I get is Volume C is SYSTEM and File Not Found). D now seems to have ALL my files, including all Windows files (and I already created a full backup of my data the other day, so I at least have that on a portable hard drive (and on Carbonite.com)). Is it possible to convert the D partition back to C so that the laptop will boot? I went into the BIOS to see if I could tell the laptop to boot from D, but that's not an option (and I didn't think it would be, but I thought I'd look anyway). Any suggestions? Would I be able to convert D to C and X to D with your software? Or do I need to take the laptop to an expert? My laptop is useless at the moment but my stepson has a Win 8 laptop if I had to download something and burn a CD or DVD. I thought about running the full recovery on the laptop, but I figure that will wipe everything out and I'd rather not start from scratch and have to reinstall my WiFi router software and all the other apps I've collected over the years (although I've had to do that as I've upgraded laptops, but it is a pain!).
Thanks!
-Rich
Thanks!
-Rich