Date: 08/23/06 (Computer Help)    Keywords: web

Hey y'all...need some help here.

My friend's computer crashed almost two weeks ago. I've got it right now and I'm trying to fix it, but it's an HP Pavilion (*eyeroll*) and it's got me completely flummoxed.

The deal is that when his computer ceased working, he ran HP System Recovery from the special partition, but that rendered his computer unbootable -- when he got to the part of the process at which it was "done" recovering and was ready to boot into Windows, it would simply freeze up. So I ended up having to transfer the hard drive into my computer to recover files, and then reformatting the hard drive and trying to reinstall Windoze. Here's the state of things, though: if I reinstall Windows from the recovery partition, I end up with a computer that won't boot because "the system is not fully installed". If I reinstall from a CD, I get a system that boots into Windows properly, but the graphics and sound don't work properly. But if I then try to recover drivers and such from the recovery partition through the "non-destructive" restore option, I get thrown right back to "the system is not fully installed".

So, my questions are:
(1) is there just some step I'm missing in the hard disk recovery that would get it working properly? Or is it really a waste of my time?
(2) if the recovery partition isn't going to work, should I kill it, or will deleting it screw up his computer?
(3) if I reinstall from a CD, what files do I need to download from the web to complete the installation, and where can I find them?
Hope somebody can help, because this has got me tearing my hair out...

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/676020.html