On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 00:13 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
Fortunately I was able to locate on the Compaq web-site versions of these utilities which fitted on floppies, so you could boot from the floppy and do the BIOS setup (the Compaq default of pressing F2 during POST no longer working).
So
a) This may be a point to watch out for.
b) Does anyone have informed comments on this kind of situation?
Yes that used to be a fairly common practise by Compaq and a few others that thankfully seems to have gone away. I can't think of many modern machines that have the bios utility on disk.
What you do find is on machines like Thinkpads there is a hidden restore partition that holds the factory default image (amongst other things). These partitions are almost impossible to recreate without a special disk set that can be ordered from IBM. There are no provided disks to restore this partition from. The partition on mine also has some diagnostics etc which are accessed with the Access IBM blue button. So you are best leaving that alone as even if you never intend to put the laptop back to factory installation the diagnostics etc are handy. *
On older machines you may also find a strange partition that is part of a legacy bios hibernation feature, no modern OS that I can think of needs this and usually there is a downloadable tool to recreate it if you do end up needing it. Older Toshiba's have this.
* This has always amazed me, First we had the situation where almost nothing comes with a real OS installation disk any more, only those factory recovery disks. Now we get machines that come with no disks at all, what is the point I ask in providing a restore image on the same drive whose failure is the most common reason to need said image. Acer's do at least pop up a utility on first boot to burn the image to CD, but why they can't spend the extra 10p and put a restore disk in the box is beyond me.