Hewlett-Packard has agreed to provide real Windows CDs to its customers instead of hiding the Windows files in a recovery partition, Engadget reports this morning:
If you’re the owner of an HP PC purchased over the past few years, you may just be in line for a free Windows XP recovery CD, based on the settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought against HP over, of all things, hidden recovery partitions and missing Windows XP directories. The main allegations in the case, which was settled without HP admitting any wrongdoing, were that HP included undisclosed recovery partitions on PC hard drives, and didn’t include the “ValueAdd” and “Support” folders that are included on standalone copies of XP.
The Engadget editors didn’t include a link (update – in the comments, Mark Orchant points out that the link is there, although it’s so cleverly hidden that no human being would ever find it), so I can’t track down the source of the story. As of this morning, MSN Money had nothing on this story, and neither did Yahoo! Finance.
Anyway, this is good news. If you use Windows XP, you should have a Windows CD. Period. (One good reason: In Windows XP Home Edition, the Windows Backup program is in the Support folder and isn’t installed by default. Backup is a good thing.)
Obligatory Dell reference: I noticed when pricing the latest Dell configurations last week that Dell will now sell home users a Windows CD. That’s right – if you want the CD, you have to pay an extra $10 for it. They’re shameless.
Thanks to Brett (12/1/05) for the very detailed information about Dell’s hidden restore partitions.
Here is the information from some Dell Dimension 1100’s purchased earlier this month. According to Windows, here are the partitions:
1: 31MB FAT EISA (Diagnostic Utilities)
2: 52.71GB NTFS System (Main data partition)
3: 18.51GB NTFS Backup (Ghost Backup uses this)
4: 3.26GB FAT32 Unknown (Dell’s Recovery image)
(Don’t you love how the “80GB” HDD only has 52GB of usable space?)
According to PTEdit:
Type, Boot, Start Cyl, Hd, Sct, End Cyl, Hd, Sct, Before, Sectors
DE, 00, 0, 1, 1, 3, 254, 63, 63, 64197
07, 80, 4, 0, 1, 1023, 254, 63, 64260, 110543265
07, 00, 1023, 0, 1, 1023, 254, 63, 110607525, 38813040
DB, 00, 1023, 0, 1, 1023, 254, 63, 149420565, 6827625, 6827625
As in Bret’s case, the utility and recovery partitions were set to invalid types (DE and DB respectively). Using PTEdit32 (which allows you to make changes from within Windows XP; very cool!), I changed the types to 04 (FAT 16
I was too long-winded. If you would like to read the rest of my comment, including some interesting (scary?) observations made while booting into the recovery console, visit my blog entry at http://www.allogro.com/content/view/34/30/
I hope that Ed doesn’t mind me cross-posting like this. I hadn’t planned on doing so originally.
I aggree also these computer giants should include the actual software and not recovery disk. I have a Gateway 816 GM Media Pc. Creating the disks were not a problem. The problem is they do not work. You get the system running and the drivers do not load. You ask Gateway for help and they tell you try this, try that. nothing works. I do not think any one that has put together computers before ever had problems when they had the actual software.Not Recovery Software.
Is MAC any better? I’m seriously prepared to return a new Gateway laptop I bought for my college bound kid last weekend. It won’t let me make recovery DVD’s or CDROM’s…it keeps saying “No recovery partition found”, when D: is clearly labeled RECOVERY, and it has files in it. Very frustrating. I don’t want to depend on restoring from the recovery partition using F11, because frankly, that partition can become corrupted via viruses.
Seriously, is MAC better? I’m thinking of returning this POS and buying a MAC.
Can anybody tell me what is the hidden partition for a Dell XPS M140?.