[dinotech]

I've been an MS Partner for a while now. Most of my involvement with them is from a system builder perspective, but I have yet to delve into creating custom recovery and installation partitions.

Using the OPK has its benefits, but it is tedious work. Has anyone on this forum have experience with OPK? If so, what could you tell me that would help?

Thanks.

Dino

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System Builder licences are actually not allowed to make custom recovery partitions in the fashion of Dell, HP, Packard Bell, etc. A recovery CD (the original Windows CD) is all you're allowed to distribute with the machine, plus any other disks for any other software. But you can't have your own recovery partition.

That being said if you're playing with your own computer then as far as I'm concerned it doesn't really matter, and you can do something similar which involves your manually activating the recovery image.

The easy way of doing it is to prepare an installation (or dual-boot installations), then simply take a Ghost image of the drive and keep it safe. Then just Ghost it back to rebuild the computer in five minutes flat. Most Norton Ghost CDs are bootable.

[Neil Jones]

System Builder licences are actually not allowed to make custom recovery partitions in the fashion of Dell, HP, Packard Bell, etc. A recovery CD (the original Windows CD) is all you're allowed to distribute with the machine, plus any other disks for any other software. But you can't have your own recovery partition.

That being said if you're playing with your own computer then as far as I'm concerned it doesn't really matter, and you can do something similar which involves your manually activating the recovery image.

The easy way of doing it is to prepare an installation (or dual-boot installations), then simply take a Ghost image of the drive and keep it safe. Then just Ghost it back to rebuild the computer in five minutes flat. Most Norton Ghost CDs are bootable.

[dinotech]

Niel,

Under MS Partner and OEM System Builder, they allow us to create our own partition with our own branding. I could even setup 10 advertisements during installation to show the customer.

All the information is located at http://oem.microsoft.com and requires a partner login. I'll make sure I read any fine print, but the majority of the documentation states that I could create a custom recover partition.

I thought of Ghosting, but I like the idea that when I work on a machine for a client, I can make sure they only have to press a button and run through a menu to get back in operation.

Thanks for the replyl.

[Neil Jones]

Individual agreements vary but as standard, System Builders's only "recovery media" is the original CD. Partner is an entirely different kettle of fish.
All the recovery partition solutions are effectively at the end of the day, variations on Ghost. Most Dells use Ghost, though the most common solution is PC Angel. And if you feed Ghost enough parameters it will automate itself.

[dinotech]

Thanks Niel, I'll look at Ghost and its options. I'll post my experience on the forum!

Dino