I have a friend's very nice HP Media Center 2005 which had been Trojan infected by her daughter. She ordered recovery disks from HP, gave them to me, I backed up 5 years of photos for her, and installed the disks as per HP's instructions (she said she had done the HP recovery which was on the computer, and I could see in the registry several of the Trojans). Disk 1 worked fine, Disk 2 worked fine, but after restart the computer can't get past setup (I mean 8 hours later still not done).
I've called HP, talked to a variety of techs, two of whom were very nice, the third an absolute a**h***. I've been told the HD is bad by tech 3 (worked fine until recovery disks), etc. Interestingly, if I shut down the computer, leave disk 2 in place, it comes up with the XP startup, shows an XP window, but no icons and no task bar. If I right click, I see the HP Pavillion HD, the disk 2 icon, etc. If I click the back arrows, I can enter the HD, see program files, etc.
I'm not new at this as I've repaired many PCs, Dell especially which is so easy, but not these weird recovery disks of HP. My conclusion is the recovery disks are at fault, as she just ordered these disks last week for a 2005 HP. Should I just give up, startup from a Windows XP Professional disk and istall that? Microsoft did state that there are issues with this particular HP computer and it's recovery disks if HP threw a newer version of IE on the disks. I can't get through the setup with HP's recovery disks.
Note: If you are the author of this question and wish to assign points to any of the answers, please login first.For more information on assigning points ,click
here
I'm assuming there is no extended warranty for this PC or you would have given them a call by now. Since this was caused by a Trojan you just may be able to get additional help from Microsofts Customer Virus Protection, their not always great at giving answers & since it may be due to a HP manufacturing issue with either the PC or the Disk they may send you right back to HP. It should be possible to get an additional set of disk? May be worth wrangling for them if Microsoft can't help- its worth a try.
Printable version
