I have a HP Pavilion DV5-1223TX which had its hard disk wiped.

Question

 I bought from HP the RECOVERY DISK SET, and booted from the DVD. It proceeded fin. It asked for the supplemental disk, and then rebooted. After trying to restart, the recovery failed.
I had previously partitioned and formatted the drive (320GiB), but on inspection with Partition Wizard, I see that recovery has deleted the partition and created a 58GiB one in its place.
What am I doing wrong? Is there a special way the partitions should be set up? I understand that usually there's a 9GiB partition for RECOVERY and the rest for Windows (Vista 32-bit)

Answer 1

Hi:
Normally the recovery disks do what you stated...create a large partition for the OS to reside on and a smaller recovery partition.
You may want to try again.  If in the event you can't get the recovery disks to work (sometimes you can't no matter what you do), if you can read the 25 character Vista product key on the bottom of your notebook you can make your own Vista installation disk and install a plain copy of Vista on your notebook.
Here's how:
If you're up to a slight but rewarding challenge you can make your own if you can read your 25 character Vista product key on the PC.
Just download the 3 files you need at the link below, and read all of the instructions to create a bootable DVD installation disk using imageburn.
Disregard the part of the text under the first screen shot about "extract the files to the Vista folder."
The files were already extracted to that folder when you ran the X14.exe file by reading the text on top of the first screen shot.
The other thing I noticed is on the 4th screen shot, where it shows Developer ID Microsoft Corporation. I had to type Microsoft Corporation in myself, and then the other codes automatically populated.
When I went to compile the ISO file, ImageBurn gave a message that about a WIM file and ISO, and if I wanted to burn it in a different format.
I selected No, make the ISO file.
It was not that hard to do. I burned both the 64 bit disk and the 32 bit disk in case I ever need them.
I tested both of them on my hp dc7100 CMT desktop PC, they worked perfectly.
When you enter the product key, it knows what version of Vista you have.
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/software-os/w/microsoft_os/3317.2-3-microsoft-windows-v....
After you successfully install Vista, you can then install the drivers from your PC's support and driver page.
Paul