My dad bought a laptop that came with the typical factory image full of junk. It crashed constantly, didn't detect the anti-virus that was installed and wouldn't allow me to activate Windows Defender. It also only had the system partition for data. All good reasons for a rebuild. HP kindly don't offer media for recovery though. Not being familiar with this, I wiped the system drive for a rebuild without first burning the recovery partition to a DVD. After lots of attempts at recovery and installation, one of my actions was to set the recovery partition as the active partition so I could boot straight into it. That worked until the recovery image wanted to reboot, then I couldn't set the active partition back.
I miss the days when manufacturers would just include a couple of DVD's. Are they really that expensive to press that they can't include the disks?
Any way, Ultimate Boot CD became a lifeline.
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