How to access restore partition in HP Pavillion DV4000?

[bd1886]

Hey you guys. Cousin of mine has his lappy in a mess. The only thing that is important to him is the pictures (However...He sent them all to me on a flash drive about two months ago!) How does he restore the thing to original condition. I have never worked with the HP partition restoration before and I'm thinking that, just cutting to the chase, and doing this restore would be the best option for him. What do you think? How do you access it and what's the basic process?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Panama Red]

He should see a Recovery option during the initial boot. It's press F10 or F11 (I forget). Once the Recovery option is entered you should be given a Destructive and an NonDestructive option. Destructive is a reformat and reinstall to original factory condition. (with all the HP crap!) Non-destructive is basically a Repair install. All files and programs added since it was new will be left intact. However, if you are dealing with a severly infected machine, the Destructive Recovery is the way to go. Pulling the hdd before hand and using an adapter would allow transfer/recovery of any pictures and other files.

[glc]

Read this article:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/g...bph07145&lc=en

[bd1886]

Thanks for the help! (Going to do this this evening.)

Quick side note Panama: Was talking with a guy who works in a MS development lab. He was expounding on all the pre-packaged crap bundled with pre-builts. Said that almost everyone in his department are running Mac laptops with Vista! "Best laptop on the planet!" He purchased two copies of crossover software from me (VMWare Fusion) and was going to set up a couple more! Talk about ironic.

Can't get the image of two bears" being in bed together" out of my head!