Inevitable question regarding OS recovery/restore...

[howagood]

Anyone who's ever posted a question about how to restore the OS has been dancing around the following question, which I now pose.

If one has installed a new hard drive in their ThinkCentre or ThinkPad or somehow managed to delete everything from the original hard drive, the only way I know of to restore the Windows OS and the factory image is to use the Rescue and Recovery CDs or DVDs.

With nothing else to go by, how do the R&R CDs know that the original image, in particular the Windows OS, is being restored to a legitimate system?

howagood

[buddinggeek · Accepted solution]

The recovery cds' will check for a bios identifier before they start the recovery process.

[howagood]

Thanks, Jay-ho! So, if I understand what you're saying, the program on the recovery disks will first check the see if the PC on which Windows will be restored is a genuine Lenovo or IBM?

howagood

[buddinggeek]

Yup it will