Rebuilding Windows 7 on HP

UPDATE ON

 The Digital River site is no longer up to get the .iso files. I'll post a new entry when I find the .iso's on-line. Check more recently in the blog for new links.

UPDATE OFF



The kids computer took a header a week back. Would only boot some diagnostics screens and everything checked out, but would not boot. I have backups, so it was time to reformat and restore. I have a HP Pavilion and it came with a hidden partition with Windows 7 to recover from.

 Seemed pretty straight forward until when it rebooted to finish installing Windows I got the blue screen of death (BSOD). Tried a couple more times to reboot, no luck. Investigating the BSOD, it appears that there is some issue on the factory image that the drivers for Nvidia do not work. There are some posts on the internet about deleting a Nvidia file to get it to get past the BSOD, but I could not get a DOS prompt.

To make a long story short, I ended up installing Windows XP to get it to boot as that was the only DVD I had. I had assumed that the extra partition with Windows 7 would allow me to restore, but since it did not, I had to get something up and running.

My next quest was to find a Windows 7 distribution to download to get back to Windows 7. Found one here that worked.

http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65732/X15-65732.iso

That is Windows Home Premium 64 bit distribution. If you want some others look here.

Windows 7 Home Premium x86 ISO 32-bit 
http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65732/X15-65732.iso

Windows 7 Home Premium x64 ISO 64-bit 
http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65733/X15-65733.iso

Windows 7 Professional x86 ISO 32-bit 
http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65804/X15-65804.iso

Windows 7 Professional x64 ISO 64-bit 
http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65805/X15-65805.iso

Windows 7 Ultimate x86 ISO 32-bit
 http://174.129.85.117/data/Windows7Ultimate32bit.iso

Windows 7 Ultimate x64 ISO 64-bit
 http://174.129.85.117/data/Windows7Ultimate64bit.iso

You will still need a key to activate, but at least you can get a DVD.