I found this message from an HP employee on a forum where they were asking how to recover a HP mini it may be of help to you. "F11 does not function on the HP Mini as there is no recovery partition. The unit includes an Operating System DVD and an application/Driver disc. The HP Mini 1000 is unique to consumer HP models, as most other HP consumer notebooks do not include discs and do have F11 function. If these were not included in the box please contact support. For my purposes, I have an external optical drive but I also use Symantec ghost 11. This allows you to create a bootable Ghost thumbdrive. Ghost also allows you to back the image up to a thumbdrive or external USB hard drive. I have images of HP MI, XP, and Win7 and can easily switch back and forth with Ghost, without requiring an optical drive any longer. -Bryan_N Although I am an HP employee, I am speaking for myself and not for HP. Message Edited by Bryan_N on 02-08-2009 12:33 AM -Bryan I am an HP employee " so it appears that some of the HP minis did not have a recovery partition but did come with 2 discs to use for recovery. This is the link to that forum discussion HP Mini however it sounds like there are several versions of the HP mini so not knowing which you have this may not apply if you do not have this version. what is your version and OS?

You're probably out of luck unless you can create a virtual machine and use the scanner in that. If you have Windows 7 professional, it includes a free XP VM, although you may need to go to the MS site to download it. If you're running a different version of Windows 7, you can still get a VM running. If you have an old Windows machine that you don't use at all and/or a hard drive from an old machine along with the Windows license key for it, you can use Paragon's Go Virtual to create a VM. If you don't have a system, you may be able to find one at a thrift shop for $10-$20. All you need are the hard drive and the license. When you first start the VM, you'll probably need to re-validate the license since the hardware is different, but I've got an XP VM that I run on my netbook for a scanner that doesn't work with Win7 and my daughter sometimes runs a VM on her laptop to access some things that were installed on an XP machine that died with a power surge. I created both of these VMs using the software I linked above. I just created them as VMWare VMs and use the free VMware player to run them.

you may be much better off simply using an imaging program and simply create an image of the system so that should something happen you can simply use that image to restore the pc, operating system and all. You can buy image programs like Acronis True image but there are a few good free ones. Here is a link to an article that evaluates a few. 8 free software to image/backup/ghost your computer (free alternatives to Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost, etc.). then once you have that program you can create new images every so often so they are up to date. you can back up to dvd or cd or flash drive or an external usb drive. If you need to get your windows cert key number from that pc in case you do not know what it is you can download this neat little program that will give you that info and it would also be a great idea to install belarc and let it run a scan and you can print off the info so you know exactly what is on that pc. Belarc Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder v2.0.1

HP usually has a "un-install" feature on the install disc. (Every HP printer I have ever had needed to be un-installed via the install disc. or it may come with the un-install in their program menu.) When I messed up an HP printer un-install and tried to re-install I had to call support and they had me put the disc in and run the un-install via the disc twice to make sure I cleaned everything out. Then I just installed it again without any problems. You might try that if all else fails.