HP Recovery Partition Does Not Boot

I own an HP Pavilion dv6568se laptop that came with a recovery partition containing Windows Vista Home Premium on it. After a while of using Vista, I grew weary of its resource hogging and its near-constant crashes. That is when I decided to put good old Windows XP Pro on it and get rid of Vista completely. I bought a nice ExpressCard wireless card to play around with WEP cracking, and decided Linux would best suit that need, so I made a partition, and installed Linux Mint 5.

Over the past 6 months or so, I've reformatted my laptop multiple times, played with partition managers, messed with boot loaders and the MBR, and caused general mayhem on my laptop's hard drive. I was hoping somehow that my recovery partition would escape generally unscathed through all this in case I ever wanted Vista back, but alas, it did not.

I am in computer science and the course I am in requires me to use Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition. For some reason (which I never figured out), when it ran under Windows XP SP3, the compiler would turn my source files into renamed temp files and then give me "file not found" errors. Anyway, I tried Visual C++ on another laptop running Vista and it ran fine, despite "Known compatibility issues" warnings. So I decided to put Vista back on my laptop from the recovery partition.

When I booted and pressed F11 to try and enter the recovery partition, nothing would happen, and it would happily continue on to GRUB. After much playing with GRUB menu entries and partition flags, I decided to give up on using the recovery partition. Instead I downloaded a Vista Home Premium ISO with the intention of using the product key on the bottom of my laptop. I had issues booting the ISOs (I tried two), and was about to give up completely.

I looked around at the files on the Vista ISO, and found a program called bootsect.exe. This command-line program allowed me to fix the boot sector to an NT 6.0 bootloader (Vista-compatible). I ran this: bootsect /nt60 C: (C: is somehow my recovery partition drive letter). I rebooted to see if it worked, and pressing F11 still did nothing.

GRUB loaded and I was even more frustrated. GRUB proceeded to boot the entry for my Windows XP installation and somehow, voila, the HP recovery partition started booting.

Once the recovery partition boots, at this point requesting a complete recovery gives an error. The reason for this is that my laptop hard drive was all partitioned up like crazy into a bunch of different chunks. Open the command line interface and use DISKPART to re-partition the hard drive to one contiguous space, then run the complete recovery.

Mine proceeded with no issues and I am now running Vista Home Premium. Maybe I'll edit this post later to say if Visual C++ is working fine or not. After all, that was the whole reason for going through all this.

EDIT: Despite some installation issues, Visual C++ compiles my code without renaming/deleting stuff. This is good.

EDIT: This page seems to be one of the more popular ones in my blog, so apparently people are having a lot of trouble with their HP recovery partitions. If you need a copy of the bootsect.exe program, let me know. If this ends up helping you solve your problem, please post a comment so I can get an idea of how useful this post is. Thanks.