4 replies to this topic

[darkman738]

I know this issue has been addressed here before, though I am having a hard time finding the articles I found in the past. Basically I have 2 questions.

1) Does anyone know the tools that OEM manufactures use to build their recovery partitions.
2) Sans those tools what methods are there that can accomplish the same thing that I would be able to build.

I would like the same feel and look as a generic recovery process you may get from say Dell or HP, but customized. I would like to avoid Acronis as I do not have a budget to purchase a license for every computer and it is less than automated, I do have a Ghost license and it may do the trick, but I thought I would look for additional options or if anyone had any information on customizing such a project with say Ghost or Clonezilla. I am looking for minimal user interaction, basically "Recover"/"Quit" -> "Are you sure" => Go/Quit type interaction.

The current environment is limited to Windows XP currently, with no foreseeable change.
Thanks, in advance.

[steve6375]

XP did not originally have a standard MS Recovery solution. OEMs used their own bespoke solutions for XP. Later installs of XP after Vista/7 was released can use WinPE as a recovery partition as the licence allows for this. For instance. OEMs can use WinPE v3 and run an imagex script to restore the original OS if the system is sold with an OEM Vista/7 OS licence. What boot manager is used to control booting to WinPE or XP is still up to the OEM.

[sbaeder]

For XP, it seems you could use ghost, and a pretty simple dos autoexec.bat script to make the interaction "minimal"...of course, depends on how much flexibility you give the user as well...

For Win7 (I know you didn't ask, but...) there are some good "tools" over at http://forums.mydigi...ls-creator-Free

[Agent47]

This may help you : http://www.farstone....pc-recovery.php

[breaker]

Yes, in the case of older Dells with XP, they used a modified MBR that accepted a keystroke combination at boot. The bootstrap would change the recovery partition type from DE to a proper one, set it active, then as mentioned above load (FreeDOS?) a PBR, and ultimately autoexec.bat that automated a Ghost (or whatever like Ghost) image reinstall. This meant you probably wanted to back up your MBR since it was "special".

The details; http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/