[ltp] Recovery experience

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, Vincent Touquet wrote:

> By the way, does IBM provide an XP OEM cd if you want to reinstall 

It's not one CD it's four. This increases the pain: due to bad hardware
you must recover everything (if you kept making backups) and that's even
made inconvenient. You know you have DVD, most vendor provides install
media in both CD's and DVD today but IBM only a CD set.

But no, I don't think you could use the recovery CD's for anything, only
for your laptop.

> XP in a different partition or is that what the recovery cds are for ?

AFAIR, you can recover only to /dev/hda1 (other partitions are untouched,
the support couldn't answer this to me either). If it's unpartitioned then
the whole disk is made to be /dev/hda1.

The MBR wasn't recovered so the recovery stopped halfway because the
laptop couldn't boot from disk when it was needed. I had to install a 3rd
party boot manager at that point to continue recovery (this wasn't counted
in the 1.5 hour recovery process ;)

However I can imagine, there are as many different recovery procedures as
different laptops. So don't take my words granted for everything (earlier
I've read a lot of contradicting info -- apparently all is true: different
laptops, different recoveries). My experience was with IBM's Product
Recovery CD for T40, T40p Type 2373, 2374. FRU 01R8047.

	Szaka