Someone brought me a pretty new HP PC to "fix". Turns out her son has been downloading music, along with whatever else comes with it, and the hard drive's contents are garbled beyond recovery. The computer has a recovery partition, so I figure, no big deal--just reload it.

Not quite that easy. It won't boot, because C drive is garbled. Recovery stuff is on a second partition and I can't get it to boot there. It doesn't include a recovery CD--there's a program installed that will create recovery disks from the partition, but again, it's on C drive, which is garbled....

I find the little program that actually runs the recovery process. I think, hey, I can copy all this mess to my computer and run it there. Nope--it can't find a supported CDRW. I make a temporary install of XP Pro on the HP and try to run the recovery program there. No go--no supported CDRW. Even though that is precisely the system that it was supposedly intended for.

I ordered a set of recovery disks from HP. $25 and four days later, they're here, and I'm trying to install it now. Guess what--it gets about halfway through and then fails because it can't find "ASMS". ASMS is there but it won't load it. Got it to pass that by changing the directory to H:\i386 (it was looking in I:\i386), but then it wants another file, and I can't get around that. I'm midway through the fourth attempt at this, and I don't have much hope of it working this time either. I can't decide: is the PC junk, is HP's programming junk, or is M$ software junk? Something about this whole mess sucks, I just haven't decided which yet. I am finding a whole new set of reasons to NOT buy an HP computer though....I've got a fair amount of experience fighting with PCs and M$ software, and if I can't get this stupid piece of crap to work, how would a normal PC buyer?!

 

PC Repair 101 - Tonight's lesson:

Never assume that just because a computer is new, all its parts work. The DVD-RW would not boot from the restore DVD, just sat and churned for half an hour before choking with a boot device error. I plugged in my USB DVD-RW. I was pretty surprised that the BIOS recognized it, and even more so when it booted from it in a matter of seconds. It's slow going (7% in 28 minutes, so far) but the restore is running.

I'm glad I don't do this for a living. I'll take building airplanes any day over computer repair.

 

F Disk it.
That will clean it up

 

Did that a couple nights ago--formatted, didn't work, then blanked it completely. The trouble was, there was no way to put anything back....

We're up to 34% at 1:58. Even USB 2.0 seems to have it's limits.

 

I don't have your computer savvy, but I buy and use quite a few computers. Most of my serious problems have been on HP's. I think it is to do with their proprietary software. I'll never have another one. I'm all Sony laptops now. They just work.

 

mikebon08, I bought a new hp computer 4 years ago. I had it about 4 weeks. All of a sudden I started getting low voltage shocks off the case. I contacted HP service the said at first its the polarity in my wall sockets. So I had a buddy whose and electrician check it out. The sockets were fine. I called again and sent a scan copy of his report. They tell me to send it back and they would fix it.
Short verson:
Fill repair ticket out with red marker for problem " Low voltage shocks from case"
get it back 2 weeks later. Ticket says work preformed" reformated
plug in and no change still gives shock but much worse now.
Call back with original repair ticket number.ticket has been closed.
Start new one.
Fill repair ticket out with red marker for problem " Low voltage shocks from case"
get it back 2 weeks later. Ticket says work preformed" reformated
plug in and no change still gives shock but much worse now.
Call back with second repair ticket number.ticket has been closed.
They tell me another department that handles replacement will call me in 2 days.
4 days go by. No call
This time I use my head and start the process all over again.
I tell them this is twice the problems not fixed, just refomatted and that I have contacted my Attorney. Who will be contacting your office some time today.
I hang up and call back.
I Tell them I represent ( my name ). With all 3 ticket numbers.
I never stated I was an attourney, just that I represented myself. In the third person.
I carefully and tactfuly say that if ( my name ) does not hear from or resolve this matter by the end of the bussiness day. I have paperwork drawn up for 5 counts of risk of injury to a minor, 3 accounts of assault, 1 account of assault on a person over 65 and careless and negligence. Since all resident's use this computer.
I hang up an low and behold leagl is calling me. They are willing to send me a new computer with a ton of extra bells and whistles and have it at my house by noon the next day.
I agreed and recieved it before noon the next day.

 

I know Dell has proprietary problems but have not heard anything with HP. Our local Computer guy loves HPs and prefers these over Dell.

But her son downloading all kinds of bundled spyware/malware and other "narsties" from popups will garble/ruin any computer system. That and if the insides look the way his tennies smell. My son has a Dell 1.4 and it recently started acting up. He is generally careful where he goes and what is downloaded but living here in the desert, he did not keep up on the dust accumulation inside. He thought it was software or something else. It was his harddrive that was frying. He has tried to rescue what he could off it before it went completely out. Mostly his writings (a budding SciFi author) for the last three years. Fortunately, he did have backup disks but there was some pages/rewrites that werent. Games, and any mods collected, he is philosophical about losing. He knows what is most important.

He did get another computer, a custom job from the Computer guy. It does the job for my son's intentions. Fortunately, the gaming card from his defunct Dell was unaffected and switched it to the new one.

Lesson learned: To clean the insides on the a regular basis from accumulative dust/dirt. It looked like a mudpit inside. Since we all use evaporative coolers, the increased humidity in his room didnt help either. Unlike my office, his swamper is just a few feet from his desk.

I work with a HP 504 P4 2gig with the kind of recovery setup you speak of. But I dont download music and very careful when and what I do download. Been through my own battles with bundled crap in past comps over the years. Try to keep my comp's "insides" free of dustbunnies despite living in the desert/swampers as much as possible.

 

When I bought Michelle a Campaq computer,the first thing I did was to remove their proprietory software from it.

IMO, There is no reason to keep it.

 

Two hp computers I owned are the very reason I started building my own.

 

It's back up and running....got up a couple times during the night to change disks. System recovery uses 4 DVDs and on a USB DVD it's slow going. But it's about done. Windows updates, knock off the expired Norton bundle, clear off AOL and MSN stuff, etc. I opened the case, it's pretty clean inside. Not old enough to have a good fuzzball collection yet. I've installed and updated AVG. It had some Easy Internet sign-up that took 71mb....with a 160gb drive it's a tossup whether taking it off is worth the hassle, but I did anyway. They're getting *** Cable and since that's what I have, it's already set up for them, don't need any other software. There's a 60-day trial of Office 2003 that takes up 4gb....lot of space to waste for two months but I'll let the owner decide if it stays or goes. I'll go through some of the other stuff, and then it's ready to go back home. It runs okay, it's a 3.00 ghz P4 with 1 gb RAM (Pavilion a1133w, in case anyone's curious). I'll stick with my home-built Sempron though.

 

I own/maintain 4 HPs and only have had 1 go down with a motherboard after 14 months of use.

When I did on-site support and repairs (including covered repairs), for the market share HP was the better and still looks to be from the calls I now get.

 

this confuses me. Ive formatted a bunch of different computers and its worked everytime. But everytime i did i guess you could say i "blanked it completely". I think what you might have done wrong is when you went to format you didnt delete the partition or whatever, and then install a fresh copy of xp or whatever os you use. If done correctly then there shouldnt be any programs on the computer, except for whatever the xp install cd puts on it.

 

It wouldn't boot off the recovery DVD. It would sit and churn for half an hour then give a boot-device error (insert system disk, or similar). Made no difference what was or wasn't on the hard drive. I first tried to restore it as I got it, then tried reformatting the partitions, and then completely removed partitions. Once I hooked up my external USB DVD-RW, everything worked fine. My guess is it's something to do with the DVD drive in the computer. It's a brand I've never heard of and have no idea if it's a good-quality drive or not. I've used system recovery disks for several brands of computers (and a few home-made "restore" disks for my own) and they've always worked fine. This one did too once I tried a different drive. I didn't think that was the problem at first because it booted fine from my XP Home cd and also from a Win98SE boot cd (although that was pretty useless).

It has XP Media Center. HP did not provide an OS disk so I could do a regular install, and even if I had, it wouldn't have put all the other programs back on. Once I got a working DVD drive, it put everything back like it was supposed to, including the recovery partition.

The computer seems to run fine. Most of the HPs I've worked on use Asus boards and either Seagate or WD hard drives which IMHO are as good as any. This one has an IBM Deskstar SATA. The case is pretty cheap-feeling but the internals are brands that I consider good-quality. Other than the DVD drive of course. I've never heard of TSST.

 

sounds like it's an HP recovery software package. It's not a typical 'reformat' and wiping of current information.

Ryan

 

Reformat of the HD & a clean install is the best advice that you have gotten. You should be planning on doing it again soon unless they are more careful on the downloads. This in not the computer, but the operator. They should be taking you for a steak dinner considering what it would cost if they were paying for this fix.

I prefer to build my own too.