Hello, hungry_for_info.

Have you tried pressing any of the following at boot up:

F10
F11
CTRL+F10
CTRL+F11

You may also able to access the restore partition by pressing F8.

It can't hurt to try any of these.

i've tried f10 and f11, but i will try using with cntl. thx for the help. i will let you know if it worked.

I have found a page that maybe useful Here.

Do you have any system restore CD's?

Also does it come up with anything when you press those keys?

i didnt have a chance to check to see if that work. i am going back to the persons home again tomorrow. i dont have any restore disk.

thanks again for taking the time

Gateway Laptop Microsoft Windows Vista XP Recovery Partition

This is probably too late to help you, but after spending the last 24 hours banging my head, it sure helped me

I have a Gateway M7315-U and during the initial install and bootup I lost power. When I tried rebooting Vista ended up in an infinite loop saying the install was corrupt and please restart and re install.

I couldn't reinstall since I didn't have the recovery disks made at that point.

After much pulling of hair, here's what I've discovered..

To boot into the recovery partition you're supposed to hold down the ALT key and repeatedly tap f10. This didn't work for me. I just kept ending up in the Windows Vista error recovery page which has no relevance to the partition.

I downloaded the ultimate boot disk, (which is free)

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

and booted the laptop. Went to HDD, Boot setup, and ran the first program there. This let me change the active partition. There are 3 partitions on the gateway HDD. The second is the 'vista' partition, the third is the recovery partition, but the first is the boot-up partition that reads the third.

Set the first partition to active, F2 to save, pop the CD and reboot.

You should now be able to do a factory re-install on your gateway laptop without the recovery CD or DVD.

Hope this helps. I've never actually followed up with a solution before, but this one had me so perplexed I didn't want anyone else to go through it.

Thanks a lot for the info. this will be useful for the future.

hey guys, this thread was a great help..though i'm still downloading the file that iaingrant posted, i hope this would help me.. my friend asked me to fix his laptop (gateway ma7) for him and i'm having a hard time since the only cd he's got is the operating system disc (vista home premium)..tried to install but it freezes....i'm planning to downgrade it to windows xp but that's my last option since he wants vista...hope this would help...i already resolved how to install xp on this one but he wants vista...but anyway tnx!

btw..im new here..its nice here so i joined in..
:-)

hello i have a gateway NV52 AMD Athlon with windows 7 when i just had it was super fast now im 1 year later and my laptop is so freeking slow i want to put it back to the factory installation but do i loose windows 7 then becouse when i bought it i had it on my laptop so will i still have it in my system then becouse i realy need to restore my laptop to factory installation?

ty linda

Hello,

Please start a new thread with your problem or question.