Slipstream recovery partition

[TeeRex]

I'm in the process of restoring an HP Pavilion dv2500 laptop that was trashed. I'm almost done and have had very few problems.

The original system had Vista and the original hard drive had a recovery partition. I replaced the hard drive and now will be running Win7 on it. When I boot I see that the option to access the recovery partition (which is not there) by pressing F11. Of course, by pressing F11 nothing happens, but I would love to create a bootable recovery partition for Win7 on the new hard drive.

I was thinking of creating a slipstreamed installation disk for Win7 with all of the drivers, updates, keys, and automated process, placing it on the recovery partition. So that hitting F11 will take me straight to Windows setup, and after agreeing to install it would go through the entire process by itself.

Accessing the recovery partition seems to be hard wired into the bios. Is there any way to control it? Can I remove the F11 option? How do I create a partition and make sure the bios knows to look there for recovery files? Will it just look at D:\ by default?

I was thinking about ordering the original recovery discs from HP and using those to restore the recovery partition and then overwriting it with the slipstreamed Win7 install. Do you think this will work?

I would appreciate any insight on this. Thanks.

[pam123]

Here is the pdf manual for that notebook : http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01295820.pdf

You can just zap the recovery partition, the manual has instructions for that, but HP also has instructions for upgrading that model to win 7 and that may get you what you want (plus all necessary drivers) :

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...roduct=3379103
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...name=c01744960