[ltp] IBM Access button

[honey]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, Paul Michael Reilly wrote:

> FWIW, I impulsively flushed my A31P hard drive when I bought the
> system a few years back and then installed Fedora Core.  Life was fine
> until recently when smartd started reporting bad sectors.  I called
> IBM and learned there is now a $52 charge for recovery media.  So I
> would have been wiser to have made a backup or left the 10G recovery
> partition in place.

I'm very much in the minority camp of leaving it on the disk too, for
this reason: instant access to diagnostics even if nothing else.  But
then, I hang on to XP for nostalgic reasons, and boot it once every 6
months or so: usually to verify to IBM that what I have is a hardware
problem (it's hard for them to argue if something doesn't work in
Windows and Linux).

Is it really 10GB?  I could swear it was only 2-3GB on my T40.  At the
time the "wasted" space seemed absolutely negligible compared to
scrabbling round in cupboards for diagnostic CDs later.