Recovering from Recovery CDs
Information about the recovery process using IBM provided recovery CDs.
Contents
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
Obtaining Recovery CDs
If you have your PreDesktop Area intact, you can make a set of Recovery CDs. Otherwise, you have to try to obtain them from IBM.
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 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.
