Is a pain on so many levels. Interestingly, the repair and installers often have a lot more capability and information to help with problematic situations, they just don't easily reveal that to the user. You basically need specialized knowledge to access things kept in non-intuitive places, but if you know it's there or can find it, hurrah! Though often still a pain to deal with.

In any case, this particular laptop oddly enough has a specialized recovery suite provided by HP, that the grub menu here detected as Windows Vista (note, the laptop came with a liscense of Windows 7, and the grub menu was installed with a linux distro). In any case, so far this HP suite seems better suited to the needs at hand than the windows recovery tools and the additional repair tools with the pro install disk. Unfortunately, it also seems to be stuck in the backup process at 81% right now, but that may be because of corruption on the disk or something, I don't know. 81% may be good enough, but this isn't my data, so I don't know. In this default setup, it's not like the user/home data is kept in a seperate partition that can be left in place while reinstalling/wiping the system partition (which is awesome to do in linux and load up a clean install of a new version that has your old profile in tact so you can just get going).

Yada yada, repairing crap is annoying at times.

i don't like the hp recovery i had to struggle with that bitch for years to fix the laptop i was using it doesn't like to back-up data to a externally mounted drive for some reason though i don't have any idea why it would get stuck it crashed for me (eventually i just got another drive and OEM disk for windows 7 then transferred my files over to the new drive)

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