Can't Access Recovery Partition

I have an HP Pavilion tx2150us laptop and I'm trying to use it's recovery partition to restore the C: drive back to factory default because it has been corrupted by some malware.

The thing is, I don't have HP's Recovery Disk and I know this computer has a recovery partition, but the recovery manager claims that it's not present. Even though, the partition can be seen in My Computer, but it looks like it's empty. I think the recovery partition is still good, but the malware is preventing it from being accessed.

Any suggestions?

 

I believe the shortcut to access the Recovery partition in HP is by pressing the F11 key as soon as you power on the laptop.

You may want to give that a try.

Another way to force it to boot from the Recovery partition is to use a boot CD like GParted and make the Recovery partition the active partition. It's usually around 1.5GB but if it is there, it will be labeled accordingly.

 

Just to add to thisisu's excellent post, if you decide to use Gparted, you have to highlight the recovery partition and then select Partition>manage flags. Set the partition to boot.

 

Thanks for the advice, Gparted allowed me to set the C: drive to boot and enabled me to boot to Windows without the Hiren Boot CD. However, Gparted shows my recovery partition as blank.

At this point, I'm going to order the recovery disks from HP, wipe the drive with KillDisk, and recover once I receive the disks.

Before I do all of this, I need to know what program(s) I can use to scan my external HD and flash drives, because they are probably infected with malware at this point.

Thanks again for the help.

 

If you haven't already checked the Malware Removal forum here at MG for software suggestions to use on your external and flash drives that's the place to start.

While you may well find other "stickies" of interest at the very top of the Malware Removal posts I suggest you begin with this one: http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407

If you need additional help finding and cleaning out the malware on your computer you'll find very knowledgeable people in the Malware forum here.

Good luck!