[ale] there and back again (an HP laptop saga)

[Preston Boyington]

While visiting a friend this past weekend it came up that his wife's HP
laptop was giving her a great deal of grief.  He had decided that he was
going to reinstall the OS to see if everything would clear up.  So what
had happened was this; the laptop was bought with Vista, but was dog
slow.  So he bought XP, formatted the system, and then installed XP.

I suggested returning the laptop to it's factory condition to see if
that might solve some of the odd issues they were having while he
searched for said XP disc.  Unfortunately, when he formatted the
partition it also took with it the recovery option.

I put Puppy Linux on a thumbdrive and booted into that so we could save
the documents and pics.  While there I opened GParted and checked to see
if the Recover partition was intact.  It was, so I resized the XP
partition to a smaller size.  Then I set the Recover partition to 'boot'.

When the laptop restated it went right into the Ghost program and imaged
the partition back to its' factory setup.  Once it completed the imaging
it rebooted normally and went through the 'first time setup' without my
having to use GParted to toggle 'boot' on the appropriate partition.

Oh, in Windows I hid the Restore partition from the system using the
Drive Manager.  I plan on burning the Restore partition to a DVD in case
the drive itself ever fails.  That way we can put the factory OS on the
new hard drive.

Now they are checking out Ubuntu, Mepis, Linux Mint, and AntiX to see
which they like to dual-boot with.  :)


-- 

Arrant Drivel - really, it's just trash...
http://www.arrantdrivel.com/

Where the road takes me - a highwayman's perspective
http://www.prestonboyington.com/