Ask HN: HP makes its laptop unusable on removing OEM installed Windows

3 pointslgp17118812y ago3 comments

My wife has a HP Pavilion G4 1201tx laptop which came with Windows 7 Home Basic and a lot of crapware installed by default. Over time with a lot of usage, the computer with 4 GB RAM and i5 processor became slow as hell. So I purchased a copy of Windows 7 and tried to install it after erasing the existing Windows installation. There were 4 primary partitions on the laptop already - 1 system reserved partition, 1 partition for C: drive, 1 partition for HP Tools and the final one for recovery. Since I was going to do fresh installation, I wanted to delete all those partitions and have a clean layout. I tried to delete the 100 MB system reserved partition and the installer hung trying to do that. I rebooted and started the installer again and it was stuck at the "Starting Windows" screen forever. Confused by what was happening, I tried to boot with Ubuntu Live CD, GParted Live CD and as well as Debian installation CD. All of them faced some out of memory error and ran into a kernel panic. Surprising because, they were all working fine before I tried to delete the system reserved partition. So I went to ##windows channel on Freenode and asked for help. Based on the suggestions given, I tried creating a System Rescue disk from another clean Windows installation, but even that got stuck at loading Windows stage. I tried Hiren's boot CD, Windows XP installation CD and even those didn't help at all. What this means is, my out of warranty laptop (1.5 years old) is bricked unless I get a HP Recovery disk (which my wife created immediately after buying the laptop but has left it at her hometown), my laptop is bricked. Looks like some hardware is misbehaving after messing up with the system reserved partition. I have posted this here to expose what HP in coordination with Microsoft does. Any suggestions/ideas to recover from here?

3 pointslgp17118812y ago3 comments

3 comments

3 comments · 2 top-level

metaobject12y ago· 1 in thread

The following link says that the newer HP pavilions use dynamic partitions. The guy says to create a basic partition (as opposed to dynamic) and it should work. I guess your problem is finding a partitioning tool to do this. Good luck!

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Other-Notebook-PC-Questions/Una...

lgp171188OP12y ago

As I am unable to boot into any OS or installer, how can I change the partition type?

phantom_oracle12y ago

HN isn't the place to ask for this type of situation.

If you look into sites like: http://tomshardware.com you will find a lot more info.

Right now, I can't actually think of any workarounds, but you could possibly do a workaround through the BIOS (again, that is just an assumption of mine).

As per your partitions, there's too many (for me that is). It makes sense to keep your failover on an external HDD.

>"4 GB RAM and i5 processor became slow as hell."

That is somewhat of a powerful machine, I'm surprised things like that slow up. One of my machines still runs on DDR1 RAM and it works pretty quick (for me that is).

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