completely stumped, computer refuses to boot

[John Galt]

my girlfriends mom has a hp media center pc 896c that won't boot. the black windows screen with the flashing bar comes up normally, but just before the desktop should appear, it freezes. the mouse still moves the cursor, but other than that it's stuck. i tried booting into safemode, but it still freezes. i asked her the usual list of questions; have you recently installed/removed any software/hardware, when was the last time it worked normally, etc. she said normal use, she shut it down one night and the next morning it wouldn't boot. i used the knoppix cd to boot and it worked fine, was able to access the hard drive just fine, and use the system normally. when i inquired about the os cd that came with the system in case i needed to wipe/reload she said that the comp didn't come with one, that she called hp and they said that there was a 2nd partition that had the files and that she would need to burn her own os cd. which of course she didn't. i would like to be able to make the system bootable again, but i'll settle for extracting the restore files into a os cd and reloading the os. any help would be welcome. TIA John

[peekaboo]

could you download windows from your computer (from one of those websites that offer it), burn it on a cd and then install on her computer?
you would later need to activate but she does have a license so it should be legal (i think).

can you browse around with a boot disk (like ntfsdos or something) for the second partition and copy the files that way?

[Panama Red]

Least painful method is to order the restore disks from HP. It'll come as one DVD and only cost about $8 but the freight charges are $15 as I remember! Use the Knoppix disk to save her personal files to another drive. You might want to download the Ultimate Boot Disk and use it's hard drive utility to make sure her drive isn't dying before you try to use the Restore disks.

[John Galt]

thanks for the advice. i've had the emergency boot cd [http://ebcd.pcministry.com/] in my tool kit for a while now, used it to do a hard drive scan as well as a memory test. both checked out fine. at this point, i think i'm just going to back up the data and re-install, assuming i can copy the recovery partition.

[cmillar6]

on HP computers if you hit F10 while booting it will bring you into a recovery screen, here it will give you the option to start system recovery from the partition on the harddrive. Once the system is recovered you can then boot into windows and create recovery cd's from the partition.

[John Galt]

i had already tried it, with no luck. thanks anyway