special system and os recovery for presario sr2170nx

I

itspull

Member
hello forum

before i begin with my questions a bit of back story of how i got to where i'm at now

my problem began with a custom install of win7 which i initially understood would give me the option to multi boot

no such option was presented and win7 installed itself on top of the preinstalled vista bundle included with the presario

later found out that a win7 install isn't compatible with the presario graphics card

the os display required a bigger screen resolution so i decided to rollback to vista

i thought that would be a simple task but i ended up having to recover vista from a folder stored on the c drive, windows.old

the rollback didn't restore all the program files and so regretfully i decided i had to reset the presario to factory settings to clean this mess i made

later found out the recovery partition had been written over by win7, i could not access it in vista or by using the f11 key in the boot up screen

the selection had been erased

i figured a solution to this would be to uninstall win7 all together

did a bit of research and discovered easybcd would help to do this and was given an additional suggestion of using gparted to help in giving the empty space in the c drive left by win7 back to vista, seemed to make sense

long story short i seemed to have misused easybcd, win7 wasn't running alongside vista, vista was listed as win7 and following instructions for easybcd i may have deleted vista from the system unknowingly

booted into gparted and this is where the story ends

i currently have an unpartitioned drive

here are my questions, 1) is the presario now inoperable, if not and the data can be recovered 2) can a compaq system recovery disc help restore the compaq partition, 3) can a windows vista recovery disc help restore the vista os

i understand that the owner of this forum supplies these kinds of discs, i wonder if they can fix this

all help and suggestions are greatly appreciated
 
Installing a second OS would always have to be to a pre-allocated extra partition and the installer would then have given you the option where to install Win 7, but as you found out it isn't OK on your machine anyway.
The Win 7 install should not have touched the recovery partition as that is read-only and hidden so you may wish to ask the manufacturer for support in that regard.

The EasyRE disks that the owner sells are merely recovery disks not full system ones so if there is no operating system onboard to start with, then they would be useless.
However you can ask support, see the sticky post at the top here: Windows Recovery CDs

If your system is truly missing in action then you are most likely going to have to buy a new system disk if the machine maker can't help you.

---------- Post added at 01:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:27 AM ----------

I should add that I can provide you with a new Vista SP2 ISO download if you wish but you would have to have your existing product key to make it work. If you would like that, please let me know and I will email it (I don't need you to post an email address and I would only do it that way because I don't wish to publish a link publicly), but indicate whether it's 32 or 64-bit that you want.
 
thank you for replying

yes it seems the vista os is either missing or unrecoverable

additional research led me to try recovering the compaq and vista partitions using testdisk, which in effect i understand will restore the partition table and boot the system again

however my efforts have proved to be fruitless, i cant seem to configurate the table correctly, the testdisk log has indicated that a partition can't be recovered, i assume that it is the vista partition since i can't check its files in the warning menu

i will accept your offer for the new windows vista sp2 iso download, it seems that's what i truly need to fix this

its 32-bit that i want

thank you for your suggestions as well unfortunately hewlett packard cannot provide system recovery discs, support for my model number has ended i'll ask support about the windows recovery cds

again thank you you've been very helpful and thank you for the iso download
 
I got notification you replied bu then they were deleted so not sure if you still want this. Regarding your partitions what you should do once Windows is installed is get a good free partitioning tool installed and delete/merge any partitions that are now not needed. On my old netbook I recall they had one at the very beginning of the hard drive, and as it never worked even with the media they supplied, I deleted it then merged it into my C: drive.

Edit: WILL SEND YOU THE OS.

---------- Post added at 08:39 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:24 AM ----------

OK I just emailed you the link...all the best :wink:
 
once again thank you for the iso and also for the additional suggestion

i'll have to make note to report back here about a full recovery, if it can be done

all the best to you as well
 
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