HP TouchSmart 420t Recovery Discs + Software

imageMy mom desperately needed a new computer (she's still running XP on a very old Dell), so I decided to pick up one of HP's new TouchSmart 420t machines for her, thinking it'll also be a great machine for Windows 8 when it arrives.

HP, in their infinite wisdom, decided that, among other annoyances, one can only create a single set of recovery media from the included Recovery Media Creation application.  Once you make the set, that's it.  If you lose the media, or if you want to make a second set on USB instead of DVDs, you're out of luck, short of ordering the media from HP for a price.

If you are stuck in this situation, there is an easy fix, assuming you still have the Recovery partition available on the hard drive.

  1. Open up an Administrator command prompt window
  2. Change to the D drive (D:)
  3. Change directories to D:\HP\CDCreatorLog (cd \hp\CDCreatorLog)
  4. Delete the ResumeSnapshot.xml file (del ResumeSnapshot.xml)
  5. Restart the Recovery Media Creation application …
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