How do I recover my HP Pavilion 4540 using the System Recovery Disk

[rocco408]

I've been working on this problem for a couple of hours now and can't seem to get anywhere. I currently have the "System Recovery", "Application Recovery", and Win98 boot floppy. I've tried wiping my disk drive clean and starting fresh, however I'm still running into problems. When I insert the System Recovery disk and reboot the system, everything seems to working fine until midway through the exctaction process a warning screen comes up saying I ran out of disk space.

 

[itsgenekramer]

Go into My Computer and see how much free space you have on the drive you're trying to recover to. Probably C: drive. If you can't see the details, click on View>Details.

 

[micker377]

Use the boot floppy disk, go into fdisk. Click on "view partitions" and see how they are set up (size). You may have a factory "hidden" partition which had the original "restore" and drivers, using up a large part of the hard drive. Just formatting wouldn't get rid of this partition.

 

[jward52]

Run scan disk from the boot floppy...it's possible your hard drive has lost a significant amount of clusters and the disk size has shrunk to where you cannot reinstall the OS & apps. If that's the case and scan disk cannot fix the drive, you're stuck buying another one. Even if scan disk fixes it, I wouldn't trust a drive like that. Find out who makes the hard drive and get their diagnotic utility. Good luck!

 

[rocco408]

Thanks for the help everyone, I've solved the problem. I had to do a low level format on the Master Boot Record.

fdisk/mbr