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i have an hp pavilion all in one desktop and i have ubuntu and i am trying to recover my computer back to default settings but when i push f11 it doesnt take me to recovery manager i dont really know alot about ubuntu and i have recovery disks but my cdrom isnt recognizing them or something i dont know what to do about it

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any error messages? –  Journeyman Geek Apr 14 '11 at 3:23

2 Answers 2

If you're trying to restore back to factory settings (ie, back to a clean Ubuntu), your best bet is to boot in recovery mode and save your data on another disk/partition and reinstall Ubuntu. The process will take about an hour but might be much easier than trying to find what went wrong with your current OS.

If you would rather try and fix the problem, you could post a bit about the issue at hand and the community would be glad to give some advice.

One thing I've found with Linux, is that when something goes wrong (in my case it's usually a driver update that isn't compatible with my video card), a full system reinstall is the easiest solution. If you know what caused the problem, you learn and then can avoid things like that in the future.

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Its probably a little late for that but, it was a good idea to make recovery disks before installing ubuntu on a system with a recovery partition - they often use a specialized bootloader that dosen't take well to getting overwritten by grub. More so, to check if the disks work, before anything actually goes wrong.

I'd probably try borrowing an external DVD drive to check if its a problem with the recovery disks or the DVD drive.

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