holmancarey

A couple years late, but since these results are still coming up in Google I thought I would post the solution to this issue. I have a laptop I'm working on for someone that is the same model (Presario V5000) that had the same problem. Would attempt to boot into windows and then restart. When I disabled the reboot on system failure the BSOD indicated hard drive failure so I plugged it into my system to run a drive scan and antivirus scan on it. Everythihng checks out on the restore partition but the main system partition is inaccessable through my system. So I put the drive back into the laptop and entered the system setup again (Via pressing F10 at the Compaq logo after rebooting) hence the original instructions for compaq laptops to start the system restore does not seem to work on this model.

However by pressing and holding down the F11 button at the Compaq logo after rebooting, you will invoke the system restore on this laptop. Which now appears to be going through the restore process (about 12 min into it) so far. Hopefully it's successful and the laptop will work again, but only time will tell :)

Thanks for the guidance TheMatt, and for reference I discovered this post by searching Google for the keywords 'Presario V5000 recovery'

Cheers