Hi, my friend brought over her E-Machine and at power up it boots immediately to PC Angel recovery asking for disc #2, but no discs exist. There is no other direction to go in- nothing in the bios, etc. Seems proprietary, can't look inside the recovery partition, Is there a way to use a generic boot disk? Was thinking of deleting the recovery partition and installing windows on top using the original code key on machine. Not sure if I can get past the e-machine bios, no floppy disk - it's pretty nice, T6410. Yes, I could format and run ubuntu but it's not my box. Has anyone ever deleted a recovery partition created by PC Angel? Is this machine dead? RIP......
Wait, let me try that again... SOme event triggered the computer to go into recovery mode using recovery disks that the owner was supposed to make after purchase. She didn't make all of them. Right now, turn it on and it asks for disk 2. Don't know the event that caused it. In the bios, it shows the hard drive connected to IDE channel 5 - not sure if that's an issue or not. No safe mode or Last known Good Config (F8) available from windows, only can interrupt boot to go to bios, but that doesn't help. I connected the hard drive to my pc as a removable drive through a USB cable. Using Disk Management in Computer Management in System Tools , can view the partitions on the the drive- it has a recovery partition (FAT32) ~10gb and unallocated space (NTFS) ~150 gb. That is where I got the idea to delete the recovery partition. Holding off-- as once I do that, there's no going back and I got no backup. I guess my question is, is whatever is forcing the bootup to the recovery screen going to give me trouble later on if I format the drive? E.g. the bios or e-machine code or whatever, or will that whole event be reset by a format and new XP install? Is this one of the reasons e-machines tend to have a bad rap? Happy Solstice! Anyone get twilight all nightlong?
does it give you the option to do system recovery at post screen by pressing f12 or something like that?
no, unfortunately - just offers F2 to enter BIOS or F10 to choose boot device. I am looking at the image where it boots to... titled - eMachines system recovery, it shows steps on the left in a column like during a win install. This computer is on step 4, with step 1 being select recovery option. Last step is 5; finalizing. SHows a clock field Time elapsed ; Time remaining. 00:00 nobody remembers anything as the box has been in a closet or something for 3 months... seems there should be a way to start the process over - for the lack there of, it's either got a s/w glitch, or it's a really crap design by the vendor. wondering if anyone has had luck formatting/fdisk c:\ then reinstalling windows w/a non- OEM cd on one of these e-Machines. I've always done it on no-name builds from computer shows, etc.
it can be done as i've done it a few times. just boot off the xp cd, delete the partitions, make new single partition , format the hd & load xp. depends on your version of xp whether it will work with the e-machine's key #.
ok, thanks - will give it a go. maybe I can locate an OEM disk and increase chances of a successful install.
