I generally agree. My own approach would be to use a liveCD and and external drive (which
she doesn't yet have) and partimage the existing partitions, dd the boot sector, then blow
them all away. Or just blow them away anyway! And I'd use Win under a VM (though that does
mean acquiring a real Win disk image). However, that isn't really the way non-geeks think.
They are risk averse and we need to help them to feel comfortable. The thumb drive
solution is a workable compromise.
Restore CDs haven't been provided by most vendors for a while (but I'll be glad to know of
any that do, or better those that provide a real OS disk). Lenovo manual doesn't even seem
to suggest that you can burn the recovery partition to CD/DVD (that was Acer's way a
couple of years ago).
>From 10 years ago, I have a wonderful "Why you should not use Windoze recovery disks"
example. My wife acquired a Sony VAIO (4GB drive, 64MB RAM. Wow!) It turned out to be
buggy and crashed after we installed Corel and stuff (she was still in her "Blue Screen of
Death" stage). I used the recovery disk. Crash. Again. Crash. 90 mins of phone hell and I
kept getting escalated to more senior troubleshooters till I got a fellow named Messier
(cousin to hockey player) and I told him what I thought was wrong:
- disk has some bad sectors; automatic fixup tries to swap them out. They have, however,
some critical code bytes.
- Crash occurs. Have to use recovery disk.
- Recovery disk is like 'dd' and tries to vomit the image back ON TOP OF BAD SECTOR. Maybe
there are now clever restores, but I suspect not.
Messier agreed. Solution, which I already had guessed ("Don't say I said to do this"): Get
a real Win disk, run surface check before install. Machine went on to serve us for several
years, then a student friend for a couple more until it was stolen in a break-in about a
year ago. (A very ignorant thief -- cannot have been worth more than $50).
JN
Spencer Cheng wrote:
>
> Sorry if I sounds ignorant since I haven't bought a Windows machine for a few years. If her laptop come with restore CDs, just use it to reformat the disk if the laptop has to be returned for service. The last eeeBox I bought came with restore CD wiped everything and repartitioned the disk to factory standard w/o asking for permission. **grrr**
>
> She should just do whatever she wants with the laptop disk now. If it becomes defective, copy all her data off (using clonezilla?) and restore the HD back to factory default and send it back. There is no guarantee that the manufacturer will send back the same laptop anyway.
>
> Isn't that simpler than all this complexity of juggling partitions?
>
> Regards,
> Spencer
>