Re: finding a reboot disc
You mentioned a pair of boot disks that came with the computer. Were they "recovery disks" or something else? If they were not recovery disks, did you make a set when you first got the 'puter? If you did and still have them, the loss of the recovery partition on the main drive, won't matter.
On the computer that I mentioned, above, I thought that I didn't have the recovery disks - frankly I forgot that I had made them. I did know that I had had a set of them, but I thought they were for a HP that I just rebuilt (lightening strike on the house). Long story short, the HP has been prompting me to make recovery disks, which suddenly clicked in my foggy old brain. You can only make recovery disks once, so that meant the ones that I knew I had, were for the other computer.
I used them to recover that one earlier today and had no problems at all, even though the recovery partition on the HD was shot. The only thing that it did do that I thought was a little weird, is that it loaded Windows XP on the D drive, instead of the C drive. Not sure what is up with that.
I really a hacker when it comes to fixing computers, but one thing that strikes me about any attempt to get yours up and running with someone else's recovery disks, is that they may not work. If I am not mistaken, there is code on the BIOS chip that will tell the recovery routine which computer that it is "talking to." I'm sure that the "super geeks" know how to get around this, but for us mere mortals, that could be a problem.
???
