Solved No recovery disk.....How to boot to dos to format hard drive

Well....I guess we will see if anybody in the Forums has a solution. This is a complicated lengthy explanation so bare with me.

1) My wonderful son borrowed my wife's brand new Windows 7 laptop as his was on the blink. After discovering that her laptop was not very fast he chose to remove the hard drive and install it in his laptop. (KEY NOTE: yes, the nice fella neglected to make a Recovery Disk prior to doing this.) He then reformatted the drive and installed his version of Windows 7.

2) Then he purchased himself a new i7 laptop at Christmas. At that point he decided to give mom's laptop back to her. He took the hard drive back out of his old machine and installed it back into mom's laptop. At that point he did nothing with respect to starting it to ensure that it worked.

3) Now I am stuck with a laptop that won't boot up as the computer obviously doesn't recognize the hard drive due to the Windows 7 install from the son's computer.

I've tried repairs, recovery, safe mode boots....and anything else that comes to mind but to no avail. I would like to get to a command prompt so that I can format (fdisk) the hard drive and try and start from scratch. I have found no help to date that allows me to do that either.

Your assistance would be much appreciated.

Do you have a Win 7 install disk? If you use an install disk to boot from, you will be able to partition and format the disk as part of the install process.

Another option would be to download one of the many Linux distros which would partition/format the disk as part of it's installation.

Hiya and welcome to the forums
Have a looky over here pal http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1649-clean-install-windows-7-a.html

This may help: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/219487-clean-reinstall-factory-oem-windows-7-a.html#post1839164

strollin - unfortunately not. these days the computer manufacturers don't supply the os disks when you purchase. That sucks. I will try the download that PooMan and Seavixen recommend and see how that goes. Thanks for the suggestions gentlemen....will keep you posted.

OK, we look forward to a positive outcome.

Follow Seavixens advice and you`ll be up and running within 2 hours. All you need is 1 blank dvd, a computer with a dvd burner and ImgBurn installed.

The Official ImgBurn Website

Official Windows 7 SP1 ISO from Digital River « My Digital Life

Use your key to activate Windows.

tornado26tiger said:

strollin - unfortunately not. these days the computer manufacturers don't supply the os disks when you purchase. ....

Click to expand...

I am just curious to know who is the manufacturer and the model.

One of my relatives bought a DELL lappie and proceeded to create additional partitions. In the process he mucked it up. His lappie was covered with on-site service warranty. A Dell guy came to his residence, put in a new harddrive partitioned it the way the user wanted, reinstalled Windows and left. Four or five years down the lane, he is still using that lappie.( I do not work for DELL or any other OEM)

I was about to direct you to contact the OEM and check whether you can get the Recovery CDs/OEM Reinstall disk. Most of them do send one or the other, may be for a fee. So try.

Yes, you can always download the right ISO, clean install and activate using the COA-SLP key that you can find on the machine, provided it is from a Royalty OEM. I only hope your COA key on the sticker is intact and readable. Otherwise you will be in a soup.

I recently bought a Dell XPS 8300 and for an extra £5 Dell provided me with Windows 7 Home Premium DVD, a driver DVD and copies of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9/Adobe Premiere Elements 9 that were pre-installed on the hard drive - all OEM versions obviously.

It's certainly worth contacting Dell as Jumanji suggests. They'll most likely send you a Windows DVD if you ask and they probably won't even charge you for it.

You can order OEM Recovery disks from your OEM manufacturer's website.



Did you make the OEM manufacturer's Recovery Disks?

When I buy a new computer, I don't rely on the mfr recovery partition or disks or whatever. Instead, I remove any bloatware, install OS updates and install my essential applications and utilities. Once I have everything setup the way I like it, I use something like Acronis True Image or Macrium Reflect to create a system image backup (also create a bootdisk). If I ever need to recover, I can reimage using my backup image and have a working machine in a short time. Periodically, I create new backup images so that I capture new OS updates or newly installed applications so that I can recover my machine very closely to the way it was when whatever happened that caused me to need to recover happened.

Sad to say that I did not have any luck with this.
Jumanji - it is a Compaq - Presario CQ62 (yeah not much)

So I downloaded the following file (X17-58997.iso) from Digital River. It is supposed to be this version (Windows 7 Home Premium SP1-U ISO x64). Did this on my PC and burnt the 3GB file to a DVD.

Put the burnt data DVD into the laptop, set my BIOS to Enable CD/DVD boot. Changed my boot order to boot from Internal CD/DVD first and NOTHING!!! It only turned the DVD on briefly and then bounced to the hard drive boot.

Anybody with a sledge hammer!!! Ha!

In the Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 tutorial it provides the MS tool to burn DVD. In addition AddRam provided a link to ImgBurn which never fails when burning ISO file to DVD at 4x speed.

Which one of these did you use?

Try the other one now. Then tap the Compaq ESC key at boot to trigger BIOS Boot Menu, choose DVD drive. Does it prompt to "Press any Key?"

Solved.....thanks for all your help people!
My bad.....I had complications when I downloaded the file and when I downloaded it the second time it put a (1) in the file name. Figured that may have something to do with it. On top of that my Nero wouldn't burn the full 3.1GB in ISO and defaulted to (UDF....i think??? it was) I downloaded ImgBurn (prior to reading your post gregrocker....but thanks for the tip anyways)
New disk installed like a dream.

thanks again. Much appreciated!

Nero is crapware I wouldn't impose on WIn7.

Use ImgBurn for any burning needs.

can we get back to the original question for a second... How does one access Command Prompt upon startup?
i need to set active partition, i think that will fix my "BOOTMGR is missing" message.
Thanks

System Recovery Options

Confirm Partition Marked Active is 100mb System Reserved (if you have it) or C, then run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

Other steps for Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Start

use your repair disk or installation disk ,boot from it and you can choose repair option.look these links Think Like A Computer | FREE training resources, articles and How-to's on computers and IT networking.here is the tutorialhttp://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/104341-bootmgr-missing-fix.html.hope it will help.

Thanks Guys

Awesome... Shift + F10 after Win 7 CD boots.
Thanks Guys got PC running again