factory restore

[johnchan]

will the factory restore replace the mbr?

[Kyocera]

Yes, at least it has on both my t42 and t30. Everything is pretty much new after the factory restore.

[gunston]

bear in mind that Factory Restore may use up lot of your Hard Disk space.

[smugiri]

will the factory restore replace the mbr?

I think this is a case of depends.Right off the bat, I should let you know that I am speaking from experience and not quoting documentation It might also be the case that my experience applies only to the T40 since T41/T42/T43 have a different hidden partition management scheme.

In the two installs that I have done so far (where I was re-installing over a SuSE Linux install which has overwritten my MBR with GRUB), I found that if the drive has more than one partition and the recovery process starts a factory restore, the installer DOES NOT touch your other partitions (it only touches the one marked as C) and DOES NOT re-write the MBR. When the copy process is complete by the IBM installer from the HPA, the installer cycles back into itself instead of kicking off the Windows part of the install since the only bootable partition in the recovery one.

In other words, since the MBR is not re-written, you never boot into the new Windows install. Again, this might only have been a problem because I was installing over a GRUB owned (rather than Windows owned) MBR.

Then again, if you re-install over a Windows install, then since you may already have a perfectly good Windows MBR from the last install, the point might be moot since the existing MBR is perfect for the new Windows install.

If you delete the partitions on the drive before the install then it will create partitions and write an MBR.

[Kyocera]

I thought a factory restore was just that, a factory restore. I have factory restored over linux/windows dual boot and it wiped everything on the disc, but that is just from my experience with a t42 and t30.

James!

[Zeitgeist]

If you have two partitions, let´say C and D, the factory restore software asks whether you want the whole hdd reformated or just C. In the first case the MBR (containing the partition informations) will also be restored, in the other case not.

[johnchan]

alright, so another question (related) will the r&r software be the same version as before the "factory" restore? I'm guessing it will b/c the r&r resides in the hpa??

I ask b/c i want to do a fresh fact. restore, get the normal mbr back, then restore it to the moment of backup.