If you’ve bought an HP (Hewlett-Packard) laptop in the last few years, you’ve got a nifty tool on your side called the PC Recovery Disc Creator. The only bugger is, the program will only create one set of recovery discs, ever. If you check the HP FAQ, the reason for this is due to licensing agreements with Microsoft. So that begs the question, what if creating the discs fails, or you lose or damage your recovery discs? If discs had come with the computer, you could just make back-up copies. Or, once you have one set made, you can always make copies of those. But what if that’s not an option?
Trying to burn recovery discs on the HP laptop will yield an error message like “A set of recovery discs has been created for this PC. Only one set is allowed per PC.” After a quick Google search, I turned up a handy message forum post that details how to fix this “problem.”
First, download WinRAR from Rarlabs. You’ll need this because one of the files you need to delete is in the D: recovery partition and they’ve tricked Windows into not letting you browse that partition. Run the installer and then run WinRAR at the end of the install. (You can uninstall it when we’re done if you don’t want to use it anymore.)
1. Navigate to your “D:” drive (Type “D:” in the location bar, it usually starts at like “C:\Something”, just change it.)
2. Delete HPCD.SYS from D:\
3. Navigate to your Windows folder, usually C:\Windows, and then SMINST. There’s another HPCD.SYS there, delete it.
4. Close WinRAR (uninstall if you prefer).
Now you should be able to run your PC Recovery Disc Creator and burn your back-ups. If you’re using DVD’s, HP’s site recommends using DVD+Rs instead of DVD-Rs. It takes a while, it’s a really slow burn. On the laptop I did this on, it took 3 DVDs and about an hour and a half to burn all three.
Enjoy! Let me know if this helped you in the comments.