This is beyond me.

[liambl]

Ill start at the beginning. I have an Acer laptop. Had Ubuntu installed on the second HDD partition (shrunk it). Been like this for a while now. It came to the point where I wanted to restore the laptop to factory default. I assumed I would need to reset the partitions to the way they were so I deleted the Ubuntu partitions and the second partiton and then created a new partition configured as of factory. I rebooted to start the recovery program, got GRUB error 22. Used the recovery CD I burned, but recovery failed each time at 65%. Found out about a bootable CD called Super Grub Disk (SGD) as it could delete the grub apparently. Got NTLDR is missing on reboot. The SGD disk also said it could boot windows in 90% of cases so I did this. It launched the recovery program from the hidden partition. It completed recovering and rebooted the PC. Now it launched the recovery again. Rebooted, recovery launched again. Next I booted with a retail XP CD and went into recovery console and completely redid the boot.ini and boot sector and configured the 2 OSes (recovery and XP I assume?) it found (shouldn't this create a boot menu). Rebooted, booted straight into recovery again. This time I went into XP setup and repaired the current installation, still booted recovery. F8 does nothing. I don't want to format the disk as I wouldn't have an OS to install. What could have happened here and is it possible to fix it withoug bying a new Windows disk (seems a very remote chance).

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read all this, and many thanks if you can offer any help

[Detonate]

On an Acer laptop, there is an Option in the Bios (Press F2 on startup) under "Main" to Enable or Disable the Recovery partition. On the one I am working on, it is called D2D Recovery. Try disabling it and see if it will then boot from the Windows Partition.

[liambl]

Did that and it still boots into the recovery software, no disk in the drive. This is really screwed up.

[glc]

Try zeroing out the hard drive, then use your recovery CD's. That's why you make the recovery CD's - in case of a hard drive failure/replacement that's the only way to reload..

[liambl]

So if I completely format/zero fill the hard drive, what happnes if the recovery gets stuck at 65% again? I looked up the error code and in most cases it happened when the recovery partirion was deleted or corrupt, but mine is still there and working. So if it does not restore properly, what are my options?

[glc]

You are reduced to either buying another operating system CD or contacting Acer.

You didn't convert the recovery partition to NTFS, did you? The main partition also has to be FAT32 or blank for recovery to work. I don't believe the data partition matters.

[liambl]

Recovery works fine, booted Ubuntu Live CD and the recovery has put the main partition back to FAT32 and all files for loading Windows are present, but it just will not boot Windows, just straight into recovery. Even disabled recovery and it still does it.

EDIT. I think I have this sorted out. I think that that SGD program said something about changing the active partiton or something like that. So I'm thinking it changed the active partition to the recovery one, and this would make it boot from that? So all i ahve to do now is change the active partition back to C somehow, any ideas how to do this in my situation?

Well this is fantastic. I can't boot the recovery partition now that I want to, and for no reason my recovery DVD stopped working, drive just sits there not reading then I get recovery failed. Looks like I have to contact Acer and hope they can get a restore disc to me.

Well looks like I'm saved, just remembered I had a retail XP Pro from a PC I was given a while ago for parts. I will be installing it tomorrow, will probably have to ring MS activation number. Buw what I cant work out is why the recovery disc stopped working. I tested it on this PC with Nero and it checked out 100% good, yet when the recovery fails the DVD drive spins up and down and makes various reading noise, exactly the same thing as when I put one of my old scratched CD's in it.