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Greetings:
A poster here referred to a "hidden partition" on Gateway (and maybe other OEM) hard drives that contains information necessary to reinstall from a Restoration Disk.
Can anyone offer any insight?
I will be reformatting and reinstalling WinME next weekend on my niece's Gateway PC and want to be sure I am not walking into a trap.
Thanks.
Edp.s. Please try to be creative in derogatory references to Gateway and WinME. I am getting tired of "piece of crap," etc., but I do like "Monkey Edition."
If you buy a PC with a Restore Disk, quite often the manufacturer will install a small hidden partition with data stored on here which navigate the restore disks and sometimes store drivers. The restore disks have only the neccessary files to undertake a restore of the O/S and quite often will have a back to factory setup option.
Obviously if you have a virus on your hard drive or inadvertently lose the partition or remove any files you can not reinstall, without calling Gateway, do they still exist?
My advice would be to go to a bootfair/thrift shop or similar and pick up a copy of W98SE for under Ł30 in the UK.
ME was badly supported and served by M$ hence all the jokes, the end of life support is at present before W98SE, so that says it all.
The moral is if they will not give you a full copy do not buy PC, I have seen too many tears!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Greetings:
Would such a partition show up on fdisk?
If not, would it be lost if C: drive were reformatted on a single-partition HDD?
Ed
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I haven't lost any hidden partitions just by formatting and installing an OS. I learned long ago to leave compaq, dell, hp, and other mfg partitions alone as they take up little space. My old compaq133 shows a non-dos partition in fdisk of 7Mb. I haven't tried to find software on manufacturers sites to restore these partitions.
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As far as I know, Compaq and HP are the only major box builders that have "hidden" partitions on the HDD. My daughter has a Compaq and it definately has one. I have two friends with Gateway PC's and niether has any kind of hidden partition. I have run Partition Commander on all of them and if a hidden partition was there, I would have seen it. I have a Dell Dimension XPS R400 and I can tell you for certain, it has no hidden partitions.
My 2 cents - Ray
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Forgot to mention, I reformatted te C:drive (the only partition on the drive) and did a fresh install of Win98 on one of my friends Gateway PC's. Went just fine with only the normal difficulties of a full install (finding drivers and stuff like that).
Regards - Ray
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Looks like you're good to go. See if you can get the serial number off the gateway and download any drivers for the computer before you start.
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Greetings:
Thanks to all.
I will go ahead with the reformat/reinstall and report back next week if I find any hidden partition or other roadblock.
Unless it all goes horribly wrong and my niece is prevented from getting on eBay for more than half-a-day, in which case she will certainly murder me!
Ed
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Hey Ed... Something you may be interested in. There is a free utility download available here:
http://www.jermar.com/wdrvbck.htm
which will let you detect and backup all the drivers in your niece's PC before you reformat the HDD. Then you can just reinstall them after windows does it's install number. Just go to the place you have them (another partition or CD, way to big for a floppy. Mines almost 20mb) and reinstall them. Makes things a whole lot easier and you don't have to do a lot of updating (assuming the drivers were current in the first place). I've used it and it works as advertised.
Regards - Ray
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Ray,
Now that's a cool program. Do you use the freebie or the $15 one?
Ed,
I'd sure use this before I touched anything.
Hope she has a burner. My save was about 2.5Mb
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The freebie is adequate for the job I need. The advantages of the $15 one are OK, but I've not needed them. I have all my utilities, driver backup file and all other files burned to CD plus Ghost backup images on CD plus a slave drive. I even keep dups in my safe deposit box at the credit union. So, as you can see, I'm pretty well backed up for just about anything short of a nuclear detonation.
Regards - Ray
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