Ok this is a weird one..
I’ve been sorting out a mates laptop that wouldn’t boot at all, even from the recovery console. It’s a Presario (AMD X2 so pretty recent) and when you power it up it give you the function key options F11 for recovery, F10 for setup etc.
Anyway, I knew the copy of vista that was on there was gone, he’d managed to kill that whilst trying to recover it and using the 10GB recovery partition wasn’t working either so after a memtest and hdd test confirmed there wasn’t anything desperately wrong with the hardware I used the windows 7 usb installation tool along with an iso of windows 7 to start from scratch (tried booting from DVD but it wouldn’t do that either which was odd, think the drive might be knackered).
So I started up with the USB stick in, tried to boot from USB.. nothing.
So I tried again and pressed F11 to boot from recover and it just started installing windows 7 off the usb.. genius I thought, its just going to sort this out itself.
So it completed installing windows, restarted and.. nothing.
Frustrated, I stuck the usb in again to have another go (thinking I’d format the drive which I hadn’t before) and pressed F11 to go to the recovery thing at which point it didn’t go to recovery it fully booted windows 7.
Then I figured perhaps I needed to remove the recovery partition so I did that and restarted without the USB and it booted.. hooray I thought, I’ve done it!
Installed the usual hundreds of updates.. restarted and… nothing.
So I stuck the USB in again and it started via F11 fine.
So I now have a laptop that works fine as long as you boot it with a USB stick of windows 7 in it by pressing F11 as if you’re trying to recover it.
And for the record I have tried EASYBCD to see if it had the boot partition on the USB and it doesn’t, there’s only 1 boot routine on there and its pointing at winlogon.exe in c/system 32 etc and it does exist.
WTF?
I’m sort of assuming the stock Presario BIOS is looking for a recovery partition? Although there’s nothing in the BIOS that would suggest that. Or is it going to be as simple as whipping out the hard drive, doing a proper format and totally starting from scratch to remove any hints of partitions/bootloaders?
It’s frustrating because it works fine, other than it has a fairly complicated startup routine that my mate really isn’t going to live with!
I’ve been sorting out a mates laptop that wouldn’t boot at all, even from the recovery console. It’s a Presario (AMD X2 so pretty recent) and when you power it up it give you the function key options F11 for recovery, F10 for setup etc.
Anyway, I knew the copy of vista that was on there was gone, he’d managed to kill that whilst trying to recover it and using the 10GB recovery partition wasn’t working either so after a memtest and hdd test confirmed there wasn’t anything desperately wrong with the hardware I used the windows 7 usb installation tool along with an iso of windows 7 to start from scratch (tried booting from DVD but it wouldn’t do that either which was odd, think the drive might be knackered).
So I started up with the USB stick in, tried to boot from USB.. nothing.
So I tried again and pressed F11 to boot from recover and it just started installing windows 7 off the usb.. genius I thought, its just going to sort this out itself.
So it completed installing windows, restarted and.. nothing.
Frustrated, I stuck the usb in again to have another go (thinking I’d format the drive which I hadn’t before) and pressed F11 to go to the recovery thing at which point it didn’t go to recovery it fully booted windows 7.
Then I figured perhaps I needed to remove the recovery partition so I did that and restarted without the USB and it booted.. hooray I thought, I’ve done it!
Installed the usual hundreds of updates.. restarted and… nothing.
So I stuck the USB in again and it started via F11 fine.
So I now have a laptop that works fine as long as you boot it with a USB stick of windows 7 in it by pressing F11 as if you’re trying to recover it.
And for the record I have tried EASYBCD to see if it had the boot partition on the USB and it doesn’t, there’s only 1 boot routine on there and its pointing at winlogon.exe in c/system 32 etc and it does exist.
WTF?
I’m sort of assuming the stock Presario BIOS is looking for a recovery partition? Although there’s nothing in the BIOS that would suggest that. Or is it going to be as simple as whipping out the hard drive, doing a proper format and totally starting from scratch to remove any hints of partitions/bootloaders?
It’s frustrating because it works fine, other than it has a fairly complicated startup routine that my mate really isn’t going to live with!