repair installation from recovery partition

[artheim]

Can someone point me to somewhere to step me through making a CD from the recovery partition that would allow me to use the repair options with XP, specifically media edition? It seems that the recovery partition as loaded by HP will only allow a full wipe and re-install of the system. If I could somehow build a CD with the necessary folders from that partition, I hopefully could get it updated with SP3 and then be able to repair my installation when it goes south. I have a copy of the OEM XP Pro and OEM XP Home from other systems of mine that I could maybe use to merge the necessary folders. Thanks,

 

[goombawaho]

I don't believe you can do much with the data on the recovery partition EXCEPT do a recovery per the routine that runs the recovery process from the data stored there.

In other words, there are usually two options:
1. Non-destructive recovery (saves your old data to a folder on the hard drive and reinstalls Windows and all other programs that came with the PC.
2. Destructive recovery - basically formats your hard drive and all data is lost + the above reload.

If you have an OEM copy of XP Home and Pro, it's not the same thing as Media Center Edition, so you can't make a CD of Media Center.

You could see if HP offers CDs or DVDs that can be mailed to you (free or at cost) that have the re-install data on them. Again, these are HP recovery CDs and not straight Windows XP Media Center Edition CDs. So again, I think you're out of luck unless you can get your hands on a real Media Center install CD.