HP Recovery Run Amok (System Preparation & ntvdm.exe)

[OttoDaFe]

About ten days ago I posted the following on the HP customer forum:

I’ve been trying — and trying, and trying — to do a system recovery on a relative’s Media Center PC (model a1129n) that went doolally a couple of months ago. It seems to load the discs fine, but when the computer restarts I’m faced with a situation I can’t seem to find in the documentation: the System Preparation tool.

If I select the Factory option, the system churns away for a while and shuts down. When I restart, I get the System Preparation tool again. This cycle continues until I’m informed that the grace period has expired and won’t be renewed. On the other hand, if I select Reseal, I can get to the registration/activation process when I restart; but then the system starts asking for drivers (audio controller, PCI communications controller, SM bus controller and video controller) that it can’t seem to find on any of the discs. All the while it’s running a process logger and block tracker, and the virtual DOS machine (ntvdm) is hogging every CPU cycle it can find.

To quote the Wizard of Id, “somewhere in my magic there is a basic flaw.”

My apologies if this is something that’s addressed either in the instructions or elsewhere on the website; it’s just that I’m getting more than a little frustrated. Thanks(!) in advance for any and all suggestions, comments and redirections.

I got three responses:[ul]
[li]A suggestion that I install another copy of Windows on a separate partition, and use it to tweak the original registry so that it shows the restore as complete (as if I have a trunk full of Windows licenses gathering dust);[]A question as to whether the restore was actually completed (I thought that my original post indicated pretty clearly that it wasn’t);[]A suggestion — from a person described as a “tenured professor” with a sky-high rating — that I try again, and informing me that the drivers should be in a folder called C:\HP\Drivers.[/ul][/li]So I try again. My next post:

Update: I’ve run the recovery yet again, this time taking the Reseal option when presented with the SysPrep menu (and letting it rebuild the SIDs, if that makes a difference). As before, after restarting it took me through the setup and registration routine and went immediately to the new hardware wizard; this time, however, I told it to go ahead and check Windows Update if it couldn’t find the drivers locally. It managed to locate all except one — the SM Bus Controller — and I was able to find what appeared to be the proper driver for that buried under the C:\Blocks\AllBlocks folder (there is a [hidden] C:\HP\Drivers folder, but there’s almost nothing in it). Since ntvdm was still hogging CPU cycles, and I didn’t want to clobber it because I had no idea what it was doing, the new hardware process took upwards of four hours; but I finally have a PC with no question marks in device manager.

Problem is, it still doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that it’s been rebuilt: when it starts up, it runs my old friends block tracker, process logger, and ntvdm.exe. I imagine I can go into startup and remove them, but I’m still not sure if there’s something left to be done.So I’m back asking “what the [expletive deleted] do I do now?” As before, I offer thanks in advance for any and all suggestions or advice.

A sidenote: I do not consider myself any kind of MS guru, but I have administered Wintel servers for a living and I’ve built I-don’t-know-how-many PCs for myself and others. Based on what I’ve gone through with this, I shudder to think what the garden-variety end user would experience if they embarked on the recovery path. The last time I did anything similar — about fifteen years ago, also on an HP — the process took less than an hour and simply overlaid whatever was on the hard drive with an image of the computer as it came off the assembly line. That’s how I expected this to work. If I haven’t done anything wrong (which is always a possibility), and it’s supposed to work this way, then somebody really should take a second look at the process . . . or at least at the instructions.

After that, as the saying goes, “the rest is silence.” I did ultimately remove block tracker and process logger from the startup list, but ntvdm.exe still kicked off when I rebooted. I did try cancelling it from the task manager, at which point the desktop disappeared and was replaced by a screen telling me that I must not turn off the PC during this one-time setup process. Several hours later I went to bed, and when I got up I had the desktop back . . . with ntvdm happily chewing up CPU cycles.

Obviously, I should have referred this directly to the SDMB community; but silly me, I thought I might actually get something useful from the manufacturer. Anyone have an idea what the blazes is going on, and what (if anything) I can do to resolve it? The aforementioned relative has indicated that time is not an issue, but I hate to drag things out like this.