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I have an HP Pavilion box running Vista and the HD failed this morning. Safe Mode will not boot, and when I try to boot regularly, it hangs with a cursor on a black background at the point where it should show the desktop.
I have run some diagnostics from my handy bootable diagnostic disk, and that confirmed that it is a bad HD, however, the HP Pavilion line comes with a recovery partition and some recovery tools on that partition. I was able to run the recovery/diagnostic tool, so I think that partition is not damaged.
My question is, is there a way to extract a bootable Vista image from the recovery partition, or get HP System Restore to write to a removable drive or a new HD so I don't have to buy a new Windows license?
Why would you have to buy a new Windows license? Did your Pavilion not come with one of those Microsoft product key stickers? Also, do you have another machine you can stick it into? If you could hook it up to another box, and in fact, the recovery partition isn't damaged, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to make an image of it. – Uninspired – 2011-12-11T02:38:20.230