System Recovery Problems

I need to recover my HP PC to it's original factory state. I've done it before with no problems.

However, this time i recieve a message saying this;

http://i330.photobucket.com/albums/l406/rsvr85/1.jpg


There is a recovery partition on my PC and it's healthy but why won't my system detect it?

http://i330.photobucket.com/albums/l406/rsvr85/2.jpg


I wiped another partition on my HDD with W7 installed on it, is there any way this could have caused this problem?

My DVD drive doesn't like burning disks either so a recovery CD is out the question, is there any way i can mount the image to a virtual drive and use a USB stick?

Thanks for any help




P.S The recovery partition isn't marked as active, should i mark it so or leave it? Windows warns me that if i mark it so and there isn't an OS on it, my PC might fail.
My other USB sticks are marked as active and they don't have an OS on them, is it safe to do this?

Hi rsvr,

It has lost track of where the recovery partition is - presumably because you created, then deleted the Win 7 partition.

You could set the D partition to active and you may boot straight into the Recovery process.

However, before you do that that , you need some kind of bootable partitioning tool you can use to reset C to active.

I would usually suggest Gparted - you can get a version for usb

GParted Live on USB

Or if you have access to another machine , the version you burn to cd - assuming you can boot from your dvdrom drive

GParted -- Live CD/USB/PXE/HD

Hope it helps

SIW2