[ltp] Recovery experience

[James Knott]

Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:
> 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.


I could be wrong, but I think I only received one CD for my R31.  I have 
never used it, but I have used the recovery partition, to rebuild my 
system.  The first time, it took the entire disk.  The second time, it 
only used the XP partition and didn't touch my Linux installation.  I 
expect I'll only use the CD, when it comes time to sell this computer, 
if ever.