[RedFox911]

Last night i decided to encrypt my HP pavilion laptop with TrueCrypt. All went well, the encryption ran overnight as i slept.
I woke up in the morning, restarted the laptop and now whenever i turn it on, i cant even get into bios, it stops at the screen with the HP logo on it and at the bottom left corner says "press ESC key for startup menu" All that is normal, but now I'm frozen on this screen and unable to even get to the TrueCrypt Boot Loader screen to enter my password. When i try to hit escape i get a loud from my laptop.

What are my options?
I am not opposed to buying a new HDD seeing that this one was old and had NOTHING important on it.
The problem is, when i purchased my laptop i was not supplied with a Windows 7 disk, when i want to reformat i simply access a separate HP partition that they placed on my laptop. So i have no way of reinstalling "Windows 7 Home Premium OA". I do however have the Product key, which is on the bottom of my laptop. So is there a way for me to get this version of windows so i can reinstall on a new HDD?

 

[silvergoat]

You don't have to order a new hard drive- you can probably just use a gparted live disk to delete the current partition and reformat the drive.

The problem is that you'll likely have to order the re-install disks from the manufacturer since it's an OEM install specific to your computer.

 

[RedFox911]

Quote:

Originally Posted by silvergoat

You don't have to order a new hard drive- you can probably just use a gparted live disk to delete the current partition and reformat the drive.

The problem is that you'll likely have to order the re-install disks from the manufacturer since it's an OEM install specific to your computer.

Where would i start when creating a gparted live disk?

 

[silvergoat]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted-live-stable/0.14.1-6/gparted-live-0.14.1-6-i486.iso + CD-r + IMGburn (burn the image to the disk).

Boot to the disk and you'll see your hard drive (assuming there is only one)- Just proceed to delete the partition and then format the drive. If you get a partition table is missing or something of the sort ERROR, then just check the menu bar and there is an option to rebuild the partition table. I don't mess with the partition size or start point when formatting the drive, you shouldn't need to either.

 

[Xanatos]

Assuming you can use another computer, you can get the iso file from here:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-from-digital-river/

Then you can also use the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool to reinstall Windows which you likely would have to do if you don't see the TrueCrypt boot loader.

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool

or you can burn the iso file to a blank DVD.