[Plastic_Fork]

Originally Posted by MT-2500

I did a complete flormat on it. And loaded a windows XP pro disk from another pc.
It had the HP windows xp with restore in pc. somehow I lost the windows xp and the restore would not restore from pc hard drive.
I also got jyped no disk came with PC all already loaded up.
I hate them deals.
I aslo tryed the XP restore I had saved on to cd's and it would not load.
I finaly got a windows 98 loaded on it but it came up with sereral partitions.
One of the was the restore partion and another one was about a 35 GB.
I think the 35 GB partition is the one hid out on hard drive.
At about the same time I found out both DVD rewrite and reg DVD CD drives were going bad and not reading the cd's right to reload windows.
I put in a good cd drive and reformated the Hard drive and loaded the windows XP Pro on it.
And copyed over and loaded most of my programs.
When I click on properties it shows 64.7 GB used and 63.2 GB free with capacity of 127 GB
Is there a easy way to find the hidden partition or make it show up?
Or can you post the best way to flormat it so i can get it all back.
Thanks MT

Ok, I looked up your HP Pavilion A367C. It comes with the 160gb drive, a P4 2.8ghz CPU, and a chipset well capable of "seeing" the entire drive. HP's are notorious for having that restore partition and equally notorious for making that restore partition hidden (what the customer doesn't know won't hurt them). Now, to clarify from your earlier post, did you reinstall with a full version WinXP CD from Microsoft and not from a WinXP CD furnished by HP? Did you use the "recovery disk" from HP? Or did you use/borrow a full version WinXP CD from someone else that was a legitimate full version from Microsoft? Pretty much anything you got from HP would have something in it to trigger the creation of the restore partition which is a Win95 FAT16 partition (unless they've jumped to a FAT32 Win98 partition recently - been a few years since I was doing computer repair on HP's). If you didn't use a non-HP, full version WinXP CD then you probably need to do so and reinstall.

Two, provided you installed with a Microsoft WinXP CD, have you updated WinXP to at least SP1? That should technically solve your issue with WindowsXP not seeing the entire drive provided you installed using a non-HP provided CD and the restore partition isn't there. The updated software supports "seeing" large drives over the 140gb restriction (I believe that's the size limitation, might be a little larger) of when WinXP first came out. Of course, your PC is very recent and if you installed using an HP provided CD, it may well have SP1 on it already (or SP2) which means you've got the restore partition somewhere hogging your space.

Failing that, you can always reload WinXP from scratch. Since your optical drive works now and I'm assuming you have a full version WinXP CD (not an upgrade or recovery CD), you should be okay. If you end up reformatting and starting over though, do this. First, make a Win98 bootdisk. If you're having trouble, go to http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm and download the Windows 98 SE OEM bootdisk utility. It'll make you a Win98 SE bootdisk. I've used it myself and it's safe. Great place.

Now, after you make the bootdisk, look in "C:\WINDOWS\system32" and locate "debug.exe" and make a copy of it to your bootdisk. Leave the bootdisk in the floppy drive and reboot the machine. Allow it to load - with or without CD-ROM support, your choice - and when you get to the A:\ follow these instructions:

-----------------------------
This will do a low, low, low... and I stress the word LOW level format. This will remove/nuke everything on the hard drive. Data and partitions (including a hidden HP recovery partition). The drive will be utterly blank and leave no trace of anything on the drive whatsoever. Make sure the drives are installed so that the drive you want to blank is the master hard drive.

When you see <Enter> that means you press the "Enter" key, not type the word in. The "xxxx" in the following lines just indicate what the PC displays during the debug process. You don't have to type the "xxxx" in.

At the A:\ type the following:

debug <Enter>
-F 200 L1000 0 <Enter>
-A CS:100 <Enter>
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301 <Enter>
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200 <Enter>
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1 <Enter>
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 <Enter>
*Note: Type "80" for the main (master) hard drive and "81" for the second (slave) hard drive*
xxxx:010C INT 13 <Enter>
xxxx:010E INT 20 <Enter>
xxxx:0110 <Enter>
-G <Enter>

It will tell you "Program terminated normally" after the last command. Remove the floppy disk, insert the WinXP CD and reboot and install Windows as normal. You'll need to partition and format the drives using the NTFS file system and then install Windows. Hope this helps out (and helps anyone else out that needs it - I've used this a couple times myself as a last resort when I really needed it).