This goes down in the"always keep an antix liveusb key handy" category. My wife's HP Pavilion dm4 recently had the hard drive meltdown. bad sectors, slowing failing, you know the drill. anyway, as she teaches english as a second language to adults in China through video conferencing, it was kind of important to get it running. and due to the software the company uses, it had to be windows.

So, being an HP, the laptop had a recovery partition. which of course wasn't accessible anymore. We had made the recovery disks, so after a hard drive swap, we started up the recovery process. Nice of HP to not actually tell you what the recovery disks do. After 3 hours of cussing and swapping DVD's (6 of them!) the machine states that it is ready to reboot. Reboot and you guessed it,...no boot device found! What the hell!

So ,cussing, I whoop out the latest antix base key we've been testing and boot up (by the way, remove the noxorg cheatcode if you are using an HP Pavilion dm4 or else you'll get a blank screen at gui start). I ran gparted to see if there was anything on the disk, and there was. The recovery partition was now on the new disk, but it wasn't bootable. there was also a very small partition at the front of the drive (200 mb or so) that was empty. It turns out that that partition is supposed to have a custom HP boot loader. The recovery disks make the boot partition and the recovery partition and the windows partition, but it does not install the boot loader, so nothing works out of the box.

So a quick install of the latest antix, and more importantly in this case, grub, a quick reboot, and now the recovery partition is available from the grub menu. and yes, grub booted the recovery partition just fine. a few more reboots (and a couple of antix reinstalls to get grub to pick up the newly created partitions) and the restore finished properly, and the wife is happy again.

needless to say, I left a copy of antix on the laptop, just in case she needs the machine to work again in the future! Some things are just easier when you can see the scrolling output and error logs!

d.o.

p.s. i figure I could have edited the menu.lst manually, but antix installs in about 10 minutes on this laptop, which was faster than trying to figure out what the new menu.lst entries should read.