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 Visit our website regularly for FAQs, articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more http://freepctech.com The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering our special coffee mugs and mouse pads with the PCBUILD logo... at a great price!!! http://freepctech.com/goodies/promotions.shtml