[Mustard-man]

Okay, I'm selling my HP DV2517EA so I thought I'd use killdisk to erase the C: partition, whilst leaving the D: HP recovery partition untouched. At the end there was the D: and the rest was unallocated space. Then I used swissknife you re-create the main boot drive, however, I noticed D: was now the primary drive. I think this is where the problem lies. I used the Vista storage management to set the main drive to Active. Usually to activate the recovery program I'd press F11 upon boot. However, when I do this it is unresponsive, and excessive pressing gives the annoying beep. So I've tried 3 different, separate XP discs that I have. Only one of them works - this is a custom one my friend gave me, which is XP student SP3 and purposefully has SATA and various different drivers. So it installs windows and finally reboots, but after a second or two into the Windows XP loading screen (where the bar goes left to right) a blue screen quickly flashes, and it resets.

I didn't make a backup cd for the recovery partition. The problem is I've advertised the laptop as "comes with xp recovery on a partition". I can format the whole drive and I should be able to install XP, but the HP drivers are not included (though you could easily download them) and there's no way the buyer can reinstall to factory condition..

Any ideas?

[shuvle]

..change the advertisment. HP drivers are a pain too. Good luck to you, it looks like the only option is formatting the lot and starting from the ground up. Takes me back to the good old days.

edit: just seen you posted at 3am, if you've been trying all night I feel your pain - this also makes me nostalgic

[Mustard-man]

Cheers for that.

[Mustard-man]

I ran this command and managed to boot from the recovery partition:

D:\miniNT\System32\MBRInst.exe /ini D:\miniNT\System32\MBR.ini /r /q

All sorted now.