The arrival of the “recovery manager” on new computers is heaven sent. Very often it becomes an extremely good idea to just wipe everything and start brand new (geesh, don’t you we wish we all had “recovery manager” for other aspects of life). But the problem is, many companies are still not embracing or implementing the technology properly. It can often be a pain the arse to figure out when, where, and what to press in order to load the “recovery manger”.

I spent a good three hours today trying to figure out why the hell the F11 – Recovery Manager button on my Compaq does not work.

All the instructions on HP sites said it should load the “Recovery Manager” when you press it, but for mine it did not.

Finally I found instructions here.

Instructions are as follows:


I know how to activate if F11 does not help to start recovery.
If U can access to START > Control Panel > Administrative tools or shorter way:
START > run > compmgmt.msc and press enter
then Disk management
Find which is recovery partition
Make Mark partition as Active
Then restart pc.

Thanks to mindas22.

These instructions are a workaround. You are basically running the hidden recovery partition as a main drive. What the hell happened to the F11 function?? I don’t know.