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Modifying HP restore CD's

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First post, by arizonapalms

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Hi everyone.

I have a HP Pavilion 6701 I've been trying to restore to factory condition with restore media I'm finding on the Internet Archive.

As the 6701 has the Trigem Cognac 2.X motherboard (https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/trigem-cognac-2.x), I've been trying recovery media from some of the models listed on there with the same motherboard, and some other WinME HP restore media as well.

I have about 5 burnt CD's here with me all not working due to model mismatch! I know it's on me but I thought I'd try this tactic first.
Does anyone have any experience modifying recovery media to ignore version checking? I've done this with IBM media before, and have heard of people doing it for Compaq media to get it to run in PCem.

I spent a bit of time googling around but nothing really documented on this process.

Reply 1 of 1, by Gona

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If you have no restore CD for your machine, you need to install drivers after the restore.
To add your SysID/MachineID to the restore CD, you download drivers for your machine, extract some of them, and look for a *.cva file.
Most of them have a [System Information] section, where you can find your SysID/MachineID, as shown in the code:

SysID3=0x0A04
SysName3=HP xw6400 Workstation

In my case I need the 0A04.
In your restore CD, in the TOOLS folder, get a RWDBxxxx.INI file and create one for your machine, where the xxxx is your MachineID. In the INI file, also include your MachineID.
In my case:
TOOLS\RWDB0A04.INI

[Product]
0x0A04,"",0,,,0xFFFFFFFF

Put this new file back to the TOOLS directory of the CD or ISO (I have used AnyBurn).
Not all restore CDs will work with all machines! I have tried three of them, and the older ones give blue screens after the restore process, during OS boot.
I have expanded my DX6120/DX6128 Restore Plus CD and added all possible MachineIDs. This is the oldest one that worked for me on the xw6400 Workstation, supporting only XP Pro and Home (which is what I wanted). Here it is:
https://archive.org/details/hp-restore-plus-C … d-all-machineid

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