That extra partition on your hard drive is the WinXP restore CD for your
system. You boot to that instead of your normal partition, and the wizard
that loads will let you roll back your machine to a certain restore point,
wipe the drive clean of Windows and reset back to factory conditions while
preserving your data, or wipe and restore without saving a thing, typically.
This is becoming a common tactic among pre-built manufacturers like
HP/Compaq, Dell, and others, since it saves on having to press and package
CD's or DVD's containing the same information. Some can even dynamically
update that restore partition to reflect newer and better driver software.
That in a nutshell is how to restore your PC to factory specs. You can, of
course, wipe and restore the OS partition with whatever you can get to run
on it (Linux), but your manufactorer will likely not help you with anything
once you do so, and you don't want to accidentally remove that restore
partition if you intend to go back to factory specs at a latter date.
Replacing that partition with CD's from the maker is a bit of a pain. Hope
this helps. :)
-----Original Message-----
From: Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of R Jay!
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 2:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] Reboot my ThinkPad!
Hi there,
I have a ThinkPad R52 with preloaded WXP Pro, but I would like to reboot the
system totally, using the start up disk and not through the "restore factory
status". As with many PCs, IBM have reserved a partition in the Hard drive
for rebooting, but I do not want to use this tool. I have the "system
recovery" and ThinkVantage CD and I geuss that it helps me to reinstall the
OS and all programs after I have formatted my hard drive.
In short, can I format my PC and reinstall the OS when I do not have WXP Pro
CDs?
I can imagine that the question is a little bit difficult, but I explain
more if somebody help me.
Thanks
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