Newbie needs help restoring Vista

[davidvinnicombe]

I recently bought a new laptop from PC World, which is a HP Compaq Presario CQ50. It came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. Not being a fan of Vista I decided to partition the hard drive and install Windows XP pro with a dual boot system. I used Acronis Disc Director to partition, but after installing XP I was not offered the option to boot into Vista should I want to. AS I am having problems locating a driver for my laptop graphics card I wanted to use Vista but cant boot into it. As a last resort I delted the partition with XP on and tried the F11 option at boot to restore the laptop to the factory shipped state. This however does not work. Under XP I can see the partition that holds the backup but dont know to restore it. I dont have backup discs. Can anyone please help me restore my laptop back to the factory state please?

[RandyL]

If you deleted the partition with XP on it I don't understand how under XP you can see the backup. Which backup? The Vista one?

 

In any case if you can't set it back to the factory settings from the hard drive you'll need to do it from the recovery dvd's.

 

Did you create a set? If not see if they can be ordered for your model.

List of Presario CQ50 models.

 

When setting up a dual boot system always install the older version of Windows first. Also as your hardware is newer there likely is no drivers for XP for some components.

[Tootech]

Hi David,

 

When installing XP you have modifiied the boot record, which will mean that your recovery process using F11 will not work.

 

If your Vista install is still actually on the hard drive, you may be able to use the Vista Recovery disk to rebuild the boot record. F11 still will not work.

 

http://extremetechsupport.com/forum/downloads/4256-windows-vista-recovery-console.html

 

Ultimate & simplest solution - buy the recovery disks.