need help restoring hp pavillion..

C

cooter85

New Member
i need help restoring my hp pavillion,it has xp on it,when i go to restore it'll ask for a password at the menu screen or whatever.and i have no clue what the password is..the computer keeps restarting its self..so what should i do?...
 
Instead of dong a system recovery try booting to safe mode and doing a system restore to a day when your system was working fine.
 
when you boot from the recovery cd, it asks for a PW ? Maybe there is a supervissor or admin password stored in the bios... possibly reset the bios...or just download the free hard drive utility from the manufacturer of your hard drive's web site. Format the hd, make sure to copy off all data first. The password is either in the bios or there is a recovery partition , which I hope your not having to do the recovery from like pushin F-11 at boot to go into recovery mode...or do you have the actuall recovery cd. I had an HP media ctr that gave the option to make a one time disk set or recovery set from the restore partition. If you do have the full recovery cd you can always buy another hard drive, then connect up the old hard drive to copy data over, iether use it as a second hardd rive or do backups to it
 
I was fixing a laptop recently which asked for the admin password when I went into recovery console, it was running XP Pro which apparently has a password protected hidden admin account? Not sure on that one though.

Anyway I got around it by going through the setup like I was going to do a clean install, but when you get to the bit where it asks what partition you want to install on, you press "R" to do a repair install instead.

Before you do that though, try what johnb35 said first by seeing if you can boot into safe mode and do a system restore to an earlier date.
 
Do you have data you need to backup? If not just do a fresh install. If you do you can download a Linux distro (I used Knoppix when doing this last time) and make a boot disk which will work providing its not a hardware problem. Then you can backup all your stuff to an external hard drive.

EDIT: Actually did you say you can get into safe mode? If so just do that again then backup all your data and do a fresh install.
 
i dont care if i lose any info or anything i had on the computer,i just wanna restore it back to its regular settings when i first bought it..as long as windows isnt deleted lol..
 
FYI - The admin password for the recovery console is not stored in the BIOS. This is the password for the administrator account in the OS. This is the password that you are asked to set when you first install the OS, before you get to add user accounts.

To re-install, you will want to boot into the recovery partition. Most HP computers come with one. When you first turn on the machine, you should see an option along the lines of "Press F11 to enter recovery" or something like it. I believe HP's default to F11 for this.

If the recovery partition is damaged, you may need to order a set of restore disks from HP. Or, you can borrow someone's retail copy of Windows to do the install with the product key on the sticker on your machine.
 
If you still have your owners manual it should tell you how to reinstall windows. You may have to boot into a recovery partition or may have to boot to a recovery cd or you may have reinstallation cd's. If you give us the model number of the HP we should be able to tell you exactly what to do.
 
ok its an Hp pavillion A1203W,windows xp service pack 3..model number is.. HP-D2537F3R...when i press F11 to enter setup it ask for a password..i have no clue what that is..i have the admin password that i just made yesterday... so now what do i do? lol soo sorry,i'm just not that smart on computers.
 
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