Thinkpads Forum

I bought the Recovery CDs from IBM several months ago as a long term investment. To this point I haven't had to use them nor the hidden partition (HPA).

It occurred to me that I have been operating under the assumption that the contents of the Recovery CDs and the hidden partition are the same. Is that true?

I've recovered my t42 with both the HPA and the factory CDs from ibm and it is the end result is the same.

Unless a package has been updated in the preloads since you acquired your laptop the discs created by the Service partition and discs purchased from IBM/Lenovo should be identical.