Recovering from Recovery CDs

Information about the recovery process using IBM provided recovery CDs.

Coverage of this approach

If you install from a Recovery CD, you should get all your drivers and pre-installed software back.

Things to be aware of

How does the recovery process deal with existing partition layouts?

Recovery deletes the first partition and then installs to the first block of contiguous free space (which could be bigger than the original first partition if there was free space after it). Later partitions are safe. The partition must be at least 8GB or so or else the recovery will either fail or produce a corrupt Category:Windows installation. You can save a little space if you intervene during some of the IBM software installs, reduce the swap size and disable hibernation, but you have to time this carefully.