Recovering from Hard Drive Crash

Despite 40 years of writing/testing software, when the hard drive crashed on
my HPm1160n media center (after almost 5 years of heavy use) I was
incompletely prepared. The system came with XP Media Center 2005 installed,
but was also loaded with a lot of software; one piece of that is not being
sold anymore: WinDVD Creator. I also did not have a mirror backup for this
system (in 1988 I started having back problems, in 1990 had eight pieces of
metal and two fusions installed in the back and in 1997 one fusion broke, so
the metal got loose... so to protect my back I had to give up playing with
the guts of my PCs) due largely to ignorance on my part of any PC software
that would accomplish this without getting into the guts and then writing
software that would map the existing hard drive 1 to 1 on an external clone
of the hard drive. So now I'm trying to recover that system - some data was
lost - without spending more than would eb required to just buy another
similar system on eBay. The 2005 XP was installed,and that alone is going for
over $100, and the WinDVD Creator may or may not be available (but not from
Corel.) I do have the original recovery disks from 2004 but without the
recover partition would probably be useless. Would there be a way to induce
someone to provide a mirror or their system OR just the recovery partition
from an m1160n? I don't even know if that would be possible, or how many
people still have those systems. In the mean time I've bought anew PC
hamstrung by Vista but which slowly is allowing me to get some tasks
axxomplished. Any help on this would be appreciated.

If you made recovery disks, you should try them. Or try the recovery
disks that you refer to. If that fails, you should contact HP and
see if they will send you recovery media that works (for most likely
a small shipping fee). No one can legally give you a mirror of their
system, etc.


On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:37:01 -0700, Changling
<> wrote:

>Despite 40 years of writing/testing software, when the hard drive crashed on
>my HPm1160n media center (after almost 5 years of heavy use) I was
>incompletely prepared. The system came with XP Media Center 2005 installed,
>but was also loaded with a lot of software; one piece of that is not being
>sold anymore: WinDVD Creator. I also did not have a mirror backup for this
>system

<snip>

> So now I'm trying to recover that system - some data was
>lost - without spending more than would eb required to just buy another
>similar system on eBay. The 2005 XP was installed,and that alone is going for
>over $100, and the WinDVD Creator may or may not be available (but not from
>Corel.) I do have the original recovery disks from 2004 but without the
>recover partition would probably be useless. Would there be a way to induce
>someone to provide a mirror or their system OR just the recovery partition
>from an m1160n? I don't even know if that would be possible, or how many
>people still have those systems. In the mean time I've bought anew PC
>hamstrung by Vista but which slowly is allowing me to get some tasks
>axxomplished. Any help on this would be appreciated.
Barb Bowman
MS-MVP
http://www.digitalmediaphile.com
http://digitalmediaphile.wordpress.com
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/e...ts/bowman.mspx