HP Recovery From The Hard Drive Partition

It may become necessary to recover your Windows installation. This will be necessary when your system fails to boot properly, becomes bogged down with viruses and spyware, or when you feel your hard drive is cluttered and you want to do a little maintenance to speed things up. This tutorial will show you have to perform a System Recovery and a Destructive Recovery using the recovery partition on the hard drive. Note: Older machines may have shipped with CDs and do not have a recovery partition.

1. Before attempting a recovery or reformatting, it’s important to backup any important data, such as photos, music and documents. This data is often located in the major folders such as My Documents, My Pictures and My Music. Burn these to disk or use an external drive to get them safely off of the computer.
2. Next, make sure all unnecessary peripherals are disconnected from the PC, such as printers, joysticks and any USB devices.
3. Power up the computer.
4. As the PC begins to boot, tap the F10 key repeatedly until a recovery menu appears.
5. You will have the option to perform a system recover, which attempts to replace corrupt and missing system files, or you can do a destructive recovery which formats the drive and restores it to factory condition. Caution: All data is lost during a destructive recovery.

• To perform a standard system recovery, click Next, and then click Yes
• To perform a destructive recovery, click Advanced, then Destructive Recovery, and then click Next.

6. Follow the onscreen prompts.

The recovery process may take several hours depending on the size of the hard disk and the amount of programs installed on the machine.

Once the recovery is complete, be sure to visit Microsoft Update and get the latest security patches for your machine. This is crucial, as your computer will be vulnerable to exploits until it is patched.

If you have any other questions regarding using the recovery CDs or partition for an HP computer, please register on our forums and post your question.