OS rebuild partition on a dead hard drive

chucknorris

Good day everyone.

I'm in the computer maintenance business and one question i cannot get a definitive answer on is as follows.

There was a time when the likes of dell and HP gave you rebuild CD's in case you needed to rebuild windows or replace or upgrade a hard drive.

In more recent years they now only supply a rebuild partition on your existing hard drive.

Of course, hard drives dieing is not at-all uncommon.

After it has died, an end user has no rebuild CD's and no rebuild partition.

The end user is of course entitled to windows (regardless of version) however after purchasing a new hard drive, by what means should an end user replace windows?

- Would the supplier send out a rebuild CD free of charge?
- Might the end user need to re-purchase windows (not possible with XP)

What is the official position on this situation? I know anyone techie an simply reinstall it for them but then your in to legalities etc.

Appreciate any ones view on this. It's a dilemma I come across at least twice a week.

InsightTech

Most manufacturers leave the recovery options on a hidden partition (saves them money not supplying disks). They reccomend you burn your recovery disks ASAP in case of HDD failure. Burning the disks will also free-up extra HDD space. If the HDD fails before the Disks have been burnt, you can usually get the recovery disks sent out FOC. If the HDD is still under warranty they may send out a replacement drive & recovery disks.

chucknorris

InsightTech wrote: »

Most manufacturers leave the recovery options on a hidden partition (saves them money not supplying disks). They reccomend you burn your recovery disks ASAP in case of HDD failure. Burning the disks will also free-up extra HDD space. If the HDD fails before the Disks have been burnt, you can usually get the recovery disks sent out FOC. If the HDD is still under warranty they may send out a replacement drive & recovery disks.

This was the area specifically that I was interested in.

Appreciated.

Have you had to do this before? meaning: ask the vendor to supply the recovery disks again.

From experience, some users only know how to use the internet, asking them to burn their recovery to DVD is like asking them to depart the red sea

InsightTech

I deal with Vendors every day, most will send the disks FOC. If the laptop/PC is out of its DOA (dead on arrival period) they may ask you to pay for the disks as they should have been burnt on receipt of the hardware. If you buy from a reputable reseller they can usually acquire the disks for you as they have a better relationship with vendors.

The support vendors provide is often overlooked when buying IT hardware. No one wants to receive faulty goods, however I would rather pay a little more for hardware that ensures I get good support should there be any problems.

If you don't ask you dont get!

dilallio

I've had this issue with Dell a few times.
They always try and charge an admin fee of up to 30 Euros to send out a copy of Windows. I've managed to negotiate this down with them most of the time.

chucknorris

dilallio wrote: »

I've had this issue with Dell a few times.
They always try and charge an admin fee of up to 30 Euros to send out a copy of Windows. I've managed to negotiate this down with them most of the time.

So that's their little secret

Still when a customer wants to get their machine up and running that would cause an awful delay.

Seems that's just the way it is. Thanks for that.

polyfusion

chucknorris wrote: »

So that's their little secret

Still when a customer wants to get their machine up and running that would cause an awful delay.

Seems that's just the way it is. Thanks for that.

Hey, you're chucknorris! That's not the attitude to have!

Whatever you say should be the way it is!!

Or can you roundhouse kick the recovery partition from a dead drive into a new drive?

coylemj

Creating the recovery disks yourself frees up lots of disk space, it's well worth doing and it's a one-off process. I think mine (Lenovo SL510, Windows 7) consists of one bootable CD and two data DVDs.