My sister's laptop went bust
 

and the only thing that pops up now is "press 11 for recovery." The problem is, she never made any recovery discs when she first got the laptop. I have a Win XP Pro installation CD, so if I just install that, would it fix the problem or make it worse? I shouldn't think there should be any problems, but just to be on the safe side, I thought I'd ask here.

Some manufacturers reserve a teensy bit of space for a recovery partition. If you wish, you can try it first before installing by yourself.

But generally "my sister's laptop went bust" is a rather generic problem. If your sister's laptop's hard disk went bust, then reformatting will do you no good, for instance.

Well I don't know what went bust. I wasn't there when it happened. From what she told me, she was running a DVD movie and the PC froze or something, and then when she tried restarting, it just goes to the "Press F11 for recovery" screen. Then it says "Disc read error. Press Ctrl+Alt+del." I dunno if that's 'cause there's no recovery CD in the drive or if the HDD is busted. I can go to Bios and whatever, but it won't run Windows.

Well what disk is in the drive when she gets the disk read error?

The only think I can think of to help would be doing a repair install of xp nd see if that helps.

There is nothing in the drive.

I can try repair install and see if that works. Doesn't look like there's much else I can do.

Update: Ah looks like the HD is damaged, as I can't reinstall Windows. D'oh.

Ah, but there's a Drive D that I could possibly format. Not sure what sort of drive it is though.

That's your recovery partition I guess. Laptops usually come with only 1 physical hard disk. Since it seems the C partition is kaput, I recommend you buy a new hard disk for your sister. (Unless, of course, you wish to continue using that hard disk, then feel free to format on to D!) :D

If I format on to D, is it possible to even repair the C drive and get the stuff back? The laptop is still under warranty though, so that's good :3

Update: Do'h. I get "An error occured during directory emmuration" whenever I try to get to access drive C. Guess it's totally gone. My sister paid for lots of songs on Itunes, and she didn't do any recent backups. She only had this laptop for two years.

Buy an external, and plug it in. You might be able to recover. Maybe. Try something called Spinrite. Bittorrent it.

Just don't bittorrent it onto the drive you deleted information on.

I doubt he can, cuz it's all bustificated and stuff :p

Then send it back, idiot.

I think the point here is that he's trying to recover the data. If he knows it's under warranty, he probably knows he can get it replaced.

as long as the drive can be read you should have some luck by doing that.

Oh, whoops, wrong thread. Thought this was the guy trying to do data recovery on his deleted information. :p