Trying to format Harddrive Keeps Going to Recovery Menu?

AssaultSugar

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Jul 31, 2011
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Men and my dad are trying to format an old Pavilion (and very dusty too) because it blue screened. We have the recovery disk but every time we start up the recovery at some point during the recovery it goes back to beginning when you first put in the disk


HP Pavillion A1210N
 


Hi,

It's important to know WHERE in the recovery process that it looped back to the beginning. Can you post that?

The most common cause of problems is new equipment attached to the PC. Suggest you pull the USB connectors for anything new you added (tablet? external USB disk drive? printer/scanner? MP3 player? camera ? anything not in the original PC). Remove any network cable and any network adapters especially wireless. If you added a new video card, sound card, etc. that can also cause problems. OS is Microsoft Windows XP Media Center 2005... which is a touch delicate/flaky.

If you get to a stock PC and the recovery format/boot still doesn't work then post again. There are downloadable, bootable diagnostics that can check your hardware including disk drive and memory. You may be abel to order a recovery CDROM from HP that you can boot if the recovery partition turns out bad.

FWIW: This PC is Athlon 64 3500+ based circa 2005. Socket: 939. Uses integrated video. DDR SDRAM @ 400 mhz (pc3200).