Just as Red mentioned with those OEM companies they had this cheesy configuration where the Operating System, programs and all other stuff the user installs would be on the C drive which is naturally formatted in NTFS and instead of giving you a Restore CD or even better a bootable XP copy, they created this secondary paritition (D) which is generally formatted in FAT32 and is much much smaller than C and the user is not to use that 'read-only' partition for any purpose other than to restore the system from.Originally Posted by patmac6075
As Red mentioned, this half-baked recovery configuration would not help if the Hard Drive crashed. You would have to buy a new HD and also somehow obtain a bootable copy of the OS or perhaps get in touch with the vendor (Compaq) and hope they provide free help.
Bottomline, since this does sound like an installation problem, the best would be to backup whatever data you created since the last installation that you might lose and then do a fresh install by initiating the restore processes through the proper channels. Normally, you would see the related options within a folder in the [START > All Programs] list. It should be named something like System Restore or Recovery with the name Compaq or not.
If that doesn't help then you will have to provide the details on how you guys installed the OS the last time.
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