System Recovery Problem

J

JerryGould

Geek Trainee
About 18 months ago I bought two EI System 4412 laptops from PC World for my twins and until recently they have caused no problems. However, no doubt due to my son constantly downloading stuff from the Internet, his had become rather slow. We therefore decided to use the supplied Recovery Disc to do a full recovery. We followed the instructions, but this didn’t work as the system couldn’t find the hidden partition. We therefore telephoned PC ServiceCall as instructed on the disc. The technician that answered instructed me to press a few buttons and appeared to sort out the partition access problem. He then left us with the process in progress but subsequently we were asked to insert the Update Disc which we don’t have. We managed one more call to PC ServiceCall and were promised the disc within 3 – 5 days. That was over 10 days ago and now I can’t get through to PC ServiceCall unless I pay £1.50 per minute. Since my first encounter with them, I’m not prepared to waste £1.50 a minute when I have no idea whether it will get me anywhere. Has anyone got any thoughts about how I get this computer back up and running before my son goes off to university in two weeks time?
His twin sister’s identical laptop is working fine except that it needs a new mains charger for which PC World’s Partmaster Direct want £80 and they don’t have one in stock. Thoughts on where I might get one of these at a more sensible price would also be good.

Looking forward to lots of insirational ideas

Jerry
 
Operating System is Windows XP Home Edition and there is just one restore disc.

By the way when I try and boot up the machine, the error that displays is "MBR Error" which I assume means master boot record error. I've tried going into the DOS command prompt which is an option when the restore disc is inserted. The C Drive has a wide range of files / directories on it which appears to be all the normal operating system files, etc (though I've no idea whether they are all there). So, I would assume that the problem is probably quite small - if only I knew how to find and fix it.

Jerry

shanegfowler said:
How many restore discs do you have? What Operating System are you running?
Click to expand...
 
JerryGould said:
Operating System is Windows XP Home Edition and there is just one restore disc.

By the way when I try and boot up the machine, the error that displays is "MBR Error" which I assume means master boot record error. I've tried going into the DOS command prompt which is an option when the restore disc is inserted. The C Drive has a wide range of files / directories on it which appears to be all the normal operating system files, etc (though I've no idea whether they are all there). So, I would assume that the problem is probably quite small - if only I knew how to find and fix it.

Jerry
Click to expand...
It very well could be that your partition table is corrupt and you may need to execute the following command from the C: prompt (c being your primary boot partition.) FDISK /MBR this will wipe out your master boot record and replace it..
Good luck!
Also check this out
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q69013/
 
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