Wednesday, March 23, 2011

HP Pavilion dm1 Factory Image Restore After OS Change

After doing a clean install of 32-bit Windows 7 Professional on a Pavilion dm1 (dm1-2010nr) - replacing the original 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium - I needed to restore the machine to its original OS. I did the clean install by formating the partion that contained the original OS, but left the others intact so that I could use the factory restore partition in the future. Unfortunately, I could not boot to the factory restore partition after the OS change. It ignored the F11 press during bootup (It actually displayed on the screen F11 - System Recovery, but then went on to boot Windows anyway). I had to go to the Windows Computer Management console (Start menu & search for computer management) & go to the section called Storage & then click on Disk Management. The Recovery partition shows up as the D: drive. Right click on that partition & choose "Mark Partition as Active". On the next reboot, the machine will boot into the recovery environment.

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