i have an HP pavilion that was running vista ultimate but orginally came with XP. i am giving the computer to my sister and she wanted me to back it up to XP.

i have my HP recovery disk, so i booted up the system and told it to boot from disk. i told it to do a recovery from disk. it started system recovery and after a few minutes it said disk read error.

now when it boots i get the HP screen with standard option of ESC, F1, or F10 for system recovery.

when i try to do anything all i get is a blank screen with a flashing cursor. so i assume i have bricked this mofo.

does anyone have any input? i need to get this puppy up and running for her.

TIA for your input.

 

When you installed Vista did you wipe and reformat the drive? The disk might be trying to reference some files from the manufacturers recovery partition that could no longer exist.


Some things I would try:

Assuming you checked to make sure the disk is clean

Try booting from another XP disk if you have one.

I would swap out the disk drive from another computer temporarily, see if you get the same error.

Sometimes an I/O error can come from underpowered hardware. I would make sure the computer is on it's own outlet.

Good Luck.

 

thanks to a PM i received earlier today, the machine is up and running. turns out the dvd/cd drive was the problem. i installed a different dvd/cd burner and it read the recovery disk fine.

thanks for the input and big thanks to the PM i received.