New HP Laptop with Recovery partition

[Rick Bowers]

At 1/12/2007 04:51 PM, you wrote:
>Hey all,
>
>I have to say goodbye to the Toshiba QOSMIO G15. <sniff>
>I chatted over the holidays with my folks and it turns out that it's 
>just what
>they would like.  I have to say that it is hard to let it go...  That is one
>beautiful machine... and the replacement system actually is paling in the
>comparison... <sniff>
>
>But, onward and downward.  The replacement box is a brand new HP Pavilion
>dv6000t (another entertainment box... I couldn't resist)
>* 15.4" Wide-aspect LCD
>* Core Duo (Centrino)
>* Intel Wireless 394 / Bluetooth
>* NVidia GeForce Go 7400 (of course, I paid extra just for you Lonnie ;)
>* VGA/S-Vidio out
>* DVD+-RW-DL
>* 12-cell battery (most important ;)
>* 3 USB / 1 FireWire
>* Media slot
>* 1 not quite PCMCIA  "ExpressCard" slot (great, so nothing I own will work
>anymore!)
>* Built-in DVD/Media viewer...
>
>
>But here's a weird part.  It comes with a great feature, a recovery 
>partition,
>so I don't even need DVD's to recover!!
>Except that the frickin' thing is 10GB in size.  Now I realize that megs are
>cheap these days, but GIGs ain't <in the best drawl a Michigander can muster>
>
>I've already gone through the initial "Create Recovery Discs" process (3
>DVDs), and would like to free up that huge partition.  Before I do, however,
>I wanted your collective opinions here.  Anyone have experiences with this?
>Compaqs used to do their BIOS config on a separate partition and configuring
>the machine was a serious pain if you wiped it... but you could reinstall it.
>
>Should I *not* wipe it?  80GB isn't that big when you chunk out 15GB for
>windows and 10GB for the stupid recovery partition (and it's full up at like
>9.76GB)

Dell has been doing this for years on some (not all) of their 
systems. If you totally hose your OS, you can reboot, stand on your 
head, hold down left-CTL, left-ALT, right-SHIFT, the numbers 
1,2,4,6,8 then press and release F1 through F12 sequentially, and you 
can restore the system to the state it was in when it shipped. (okay, 
that is not the actual sequence but you get the idea).

Alternatively, you can reload your OS from the original CD/DVD media 
and re-configure everything.

I agree 10GB sounds huge. My Dell Lattitude uses about 7.5GB, though. 
Good ole Winders -- needs to go on a diet!

But, if you plan on blowing away Windows to put on a real OS, I'd 
delete the recovery partition, too...
If you think you may need to restore to "factory specs" some day, I'd 
leave it.

Get an external USB/Firewire/etc. drive to hold your videos, etc. 
That's what I do.

~Rick

>TIA,
>Matt
>--
>Matthew Carpenter
>Senior Security Analyst
>Intelguardians Network Intelligence, LLC
>http://www.intelguardians.com
>
>
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