Here’s my story:

I have contacted HP several times by phone and email and nobody did ever gave me a solution. Windows Vista Home Premium –preloaded with my pavillion sg3420la–updated itself and that update damaged and erased the recovery partition. The pavillion was recently bought, december 13, 2008, I’m in Venezuela. I never believed I was going to get such bad customer service from HP. HP told me since my pc is under warranty and its valid they would send me the recovery disks at no cost. UPS was supposed to send the disks. I’m waiting for the disks since january 11. UPS leaved a message on my answering machine with a female voice that can’t be understanded. She gave me a phone number and it’s unclear what is the phone number. I tried to listen to it over 20 times with no avail. UPS doesn’t answer the phones. There aren’t any email addresses in the website for my country. Nobody seems to be there. How come it’s possible that nobody is on UPS at 10 am or 3 pm? It seems UPS it’s making fun of people and it’s disrespectful. The tracking number z5552401 it’s incorrect and I allways get a "not available" message on the UPS website. I’m really dissapointed and upset. I’m no longer waiting for the disk. I will never make a purchase from HP again, unless they give me a free printer or any other gift.

So………did hp customer service or treated you like garbage and seemed to make fun of you? Or did they were unhelpful?

I have a sony Vaio, which never came with an installation disk.
I just had to have my western digital hard drive replaced by warranty.
My vaio recovery disks will not work this time around due to a bigger hard drive, but they did originally in 2008.
Being told motherboard may be dead, but bios runs fine.
Where can I get a windows XP installation cd, as I have a valid key code on my laptop, but sony offers no free service

I was using my Acer Aspire 5100 today when all of a sudden it shut itself off. It is now displaying the message 0200 fixed disk failure 0. From what I understand, this means that my hard disk crashed. Thankfully, my computer is still under manufacturer’s warranty (I bought it on 6/09/07 and the warranty is for a year.) so I know that they will probably replace the hard disk. But I understand that all files and "software" are probably lost. Does this mean that they’ll send my computer back sans Windows Vista and all of the basic software that the computer came with? When I bought the laptop from Circuit City they didn’t give me any recovery disks so if I have it serviced and they have to replace the hard drive, am I screwed out of Windows Vista and the basic software that came with the computer? Or will they reload any software that originally came with the computer under my warranty? Any ideas?

I made recovery disk for my windows vista home basic last year and tonight i wanna recover my laptop and when i restart my computer with the disk inside,the recovery disks dont load,help me please

When is installed Vista it asked me to create recovery DVD’s… but it also created a recovery drive on the PC.
I was wondering if it is alright to delete the data in that drive? Will it be possible to recover Vista using only the recovery disks?

So i got Windows Recovery Disks and i can use them to recover my vista along with the Vista CD? but there is a recovery disk creator thing. Im not sure? any info would help thank.

I have a laptop that I’ve been trying to restore to its factory settings which is a Compaq Armada (I don’t know which one exactly) and it runs in Windows XP. I don’t have a recovery disk (except for the Service Pack) and I’m not sure if I’m capable of burning recovery disks. Does anyone know how to make recovery disks and/or restore it to its factory settings (step-by-step guide)?

I really want to just reset the whole laptop as if it was just bought brand new. And for some odd reason, the firewall settings cannot be found.

I have a Hewlett Packard media center computer and it has a problem booting up.. I heard there is a way to reinstall windows on the "factory image" partition and not lose all the data on my harddrives.. how do I find directions to do this? I have backup recovery disks (3 DVDs I burned), not a Vista installation disk.

I have contacted HP several times by phone and email and nobody did ever gave me a solution. Windows Vista Home Premium –preloaded with my pavillion sg3420la–updated itself and that update damaged and erased the recovery partition. The pavillion was recently bought, december 13, 2008, I’m in Venezuela. I never believed I was going to get such bad customer service from HP. HP told me since my pc is under warranty and its valid they would send me the recovery disks at no cost. UPS was supposed to send the disks. I’m waiting for the disks since january 11. UPS leaved a message on my answering machine with a female voice that can’t be understanded. She gave me a phone number and it’s unclear what is the phone number. I tried to listen to it over 20 times with no avail. UPS doesn’t answer the phones. There aren’t any email addresses in the website for my country. Nobody seems to be there. How come it’s possible that nobody is on UPS at 10 am or 3 pm? It seems UPS it’s making fun of people and it’s disrespectful. The tracking number z5552401 it’s incorrect and I allways get a "not available" message on the UPS website. I’m really dissapointed and upset. I’m no longer waiting for the disk. I will never make a purchase from HP again, unless they give me a free printer or any other gift.

So………did hp customer service or treated you like garbage and seemed to make fun of you? Or did they were unhelpful?

I had Windows XP which I ran recovery disk on with no probelm. I have those. I upgraded to Windows Vista. When I try to run recovery disks, (STODD.dll) comes up to stop the process. Can anyone tell me how to override or correct this so I can make a Windows Vista Recovery disk and keep up to date.

i have windows xp service pack 1, home edition, compaq. i registry corrupted, so i cant boot in to the system. i wanna reformat the whole hard drive. i didnt make recovery disk before when i had the chance. i dont wanna try the registry fixing. i just wanna order recovery disks. suggestions?

i have asked 2 questions to help answer my problem, if you havent please read "what is wrong with my computer?" question i asked, it will quote "dell" and i give speciffic spec’s on the model and service pack i have. please read that and tell me,

1. what do recovery disks do?

2. would it help my computer?

please! please! help me and please read my other question.

I bought a laptop from Data Care center, Pune two years ago. Model hp-dv 6226.
It had windows Vista pre-installed.
For some reason I had to install win-XP SP2 in it. CD writer/DVD player, camera, battery is not functioning properly with XP.

Now I want to install Vista again. I only have 2 CDs of recovery disks out of three and I have missed the third disk.

What can be the best way to resolve this?

Getting " Primary Master hard Disk S.M.A.R.T Status Bad" when trying to Boot and it wont go past this screen, this is my in laws PC and they have had virus problems etc in the past. I think it needs a new HD but wanted to try a system recovery first. Anyone know any good sites where i can burn the System Recovery Disks?

I had a recent system crash while trying to download the service patch2 for Windows XP. It completely disabled my computers internet connections and would not enable me to make a new connection. I brought it to the "Geek Squad" whom told me I needed to run the systems restore disks as it was constantly disabling the systems components. Of course, the biggest problem with that is that I bought the computer used and did not get the recovery disks for it.

I just bought a new laptop that came with two recovery disks on DVDR. I also have a desktop with Windows XP installed. Can I use the Vista operating system on the disks to update my desktop to run Vista? Ask if you need more details.

so im making my gaming comp like next week and i have all the parts besides the operating system, but i have recovery disks from my old comp, so i was wondering when i put my computer together can i just insert my windows xp recovery disk to install xp on my comp instead of wasting 100$ on an OS?

Hi I want to build a desktop computer. I just bought a laptop though so I don’t have too much money. one area I was looking to save $ in was the o.s. I have the recovery disks that I made when i got my new computer. Can I use these and sucessfully install windows on the computer i build? thanks.

I have lost my recovery disks i made for my laptop and also lost the recovery partition. i have managed to restore the system by installing vista and getting the drivers of the net, but i dont have the recovery sofware on vista to make a recovery disk, where can i get this software so i dont have to go through all the hassle again.

I had Cyberlink DVD maker, among other programs, installed by Geek Squad. I uninstalled it, but now I wish to have it back. Could I use the Geek Squad recovery disk to select only Cyberlink for reinstallation? Cyberlink was already installed when the recovery disks were made.

I have Windows Vista Ultimate. My computer has slowed down considerably over the past few weeks and I wanted to completely reformat it. I have Windows recovery disks as well as hard disk partition. I booted the computer with the recovery disks in the DVD drive but the screen said that the disks are not made for this PC and the recovery process cannot be carried out. I am sure the disks were made by this PC only. How do I reformat my PC so that it is back to factory settings?

I got my computer 6 months ago, but I think i got a virus already. I can't start my disk defrag and it won't let me do a system restore anymore as well. I made a couple of recovery disks for windows vista, but not sure how to do it. Can you only do a system recovery once? Is it to early to wipe out my system clean because it's only been 6 months?

I have seemed to mis-placed my recovery disks for my Dell inspiron 1501 laptop. Is there a way i can download it online and burn to a disk?
I needed to recover my laptop due to "updates" not installing proper then it will shut down try to install and keep going throught his non-stop

I didn’t create my recovery disk until I had the computer for almost a year. By then, I had added a number of programs. Everything I read about recovery disks indicates that your computer will be restored to the original settings. That assumes, however, that the recovery disk was created upon first obtaining the computer.

Will my disks recover the computer to the original factory settings, or will they also contain all of the programs that were on the computer when I created the disks?

Thank you for your responses!