Compaq Restore CD's

My girlfriend has a Compaq S6100NX Presario PC and we decided to do a system recovery (format) with the recovery partition on the hdd. I followed the instructions in the manual but when it hit 5% it started saying it could not find the files to restore and will no longer boot into XP. I see on HP's website you can purchase the restore cd's but they are 30$ to ship to Canada. Is there anywhere you can download these cd's? It seems like the cost is just to have it shipped. It would be nice if you could download it right off there website. Can anyone help?

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Comments

royal

If they charge you for it, downloading it for free somewhere would basically be considered piracy as far as I am concerned.

Plantwiz

No, I've only known to purchase them. When it was Compaq, there have been times when you could pleed your case to get them to ship you the disks, but that was several years back now.

The going rate for 'replacement' disks is $20-30 so there probably isn't much else to do except pay it and get your disks.

Sorry

Humper

icroyal wrote:

If they charge you for it, downloading it for free somewhere would basically be considered piracy as far as I am concerned.

Thats what I figured, but what I should have done was created the recovery cd off the machine before using the bios system restore. I am not trying to pirate software I am just curious if there is anywhere to download it off the hp/compaq website...I wasnt able to find it. It is annoying though when they DO NOT give you a system recovery cd but just a partition on the drive...bah humbug!

royal

ModemHumper wrote:

I am not trying to pirate software

I know. I was just stating that it would basically be illegal. I agree with you it's a little annoying that they don't give you a cd even though you bought your computer. I remember very very very long ago when I wasn't into building computers yet, I bought an hp pavillion system. I wanted to upgrade to a new Windows OS, and HP wanted to charge me a ton of money just for the drivers to upgrade the drivers to a new OS. These CDs and software should be free as long as you purchased their system. At least that's how I feel.

Slowhand

We ran into the same problem with newer computers, while I was working at a tech shop. In a lot of cases, it was the HDD that was failing, and we weren't able to recover the operating system. We had luck, in a lot of cases, having the customer get the discs from the manufacturer for free, since there was no way to restore the system. The only case we really had problems with was when getting a restore disc was an optional add-on in the initial purchase. In those cases, the customer was always stuck paying because "they should have purchased the recovery media". You could contact Compaq and ask them, the worst they can say is "no".

RussS

Compaq restore CDs are bogus - I always blow away the hard drive on any HP/Compaq machine (Plas Dell and all the others) and install a fresh load of XP and then install whatever drivers I need. In many cases the native windows driver will allow the machine to work considerably better than the supplied drivers on the image - plus you do not install all the bogus monitoring and updating tools.

Worse is to come though - the latest HP laptops come with no disks and you have to create a restore disk (1 or 2 DVDs or a bunch of CDs) as if you get screwed up they will not provide much assistance.

Webmaster

RussS wrote:

Compaq restore CDs are bogus - I always blow away the hard drive on any HP/Compaq machine (Plas Dell and all the others) and install a fresh load of XP and then install whatever drivers I need. In many cases the native windows driver will allow the machine to work considerably better than the supplied drivers on the image - plus you do not install all the bogus monitoring and updating tools.

It's been almost a decade since I last worked with the Compaq CD, and I forgot the names of those updates, xxx packs or something. But I do remember it was a pain and ended up creating my own restore CDs (well, unnattended installs for Windows NT...).

I suggest taking a look at Ximage, err... now ImageX. It's an imaging tool from Microsoft that allows you to create images in the same format as Windows Vista. Instead of having to reinstall, you can simply copy the image to the disk. Very fast too. Anyone future Vista owner who frequently upgrades the PCs hardware will want to know about this tool to avoid using up the max nr of allowed reactivations.