[Eddie]

it is!

[Sidders]

There must be some way to do it. There might be some way of playing around with your hard disk partitions and creating a new partition which you can somehow image your recovery CD onto and then booting off that. I have some software that lets you resize partitions and create new ones without formatting. I'm sure there must be software somewhere that burns an ISO or BIN file onto a hard disk. Console will probably know of something.

[Console]

While it would be possible to do that, although extremely hard to convert a bootable cd into a bootable harddrive partition, the problem then becomes the program overwriting itself as it's tries to put the laptop back to factory settings. It would crash half way through and end up with a less usuable system than it is now.

[Sidders]

It depends how it does it, it may just be a case of it copying files and settings onto the primary partition. If you set the 'CD' up as a secondary partition there may be no problems. Although I still wouldn't recommend it as anything except a last resort.

[Console]

The recovery program would format the harddrive, deleting itself in the process. Deleting ones self is bad.

[Sidders]

Yeah, but what I'm saying is it might not format the entire drive, only the largest partition. Although it would most likely delete all the partitions before it starts.

It might be worth a punt as a long shot, but I think Console is probably right in thinking it won't work.

[Eddie]

nope - that's too much of a long shot and simply not worth it. The whole point of this thread was to find a (very) easy way to set my computer back to factory settings. Anything risky or less than easy is not worth it, I can't afford to be without a computer at the momen.

[Quincy]

im so glad im not a nerd

[Sidders]

I still reckon there'll be a way. I'm googling it as we speak.

[Eddie]

Thanks Sidla!

[Sidders]

No luck so far. I thought you might be able to get some sort of linux floppy that mounts a USB CD drive and then boots to it, but I can't find anything. Not even sure if it's possible.

[Console]

You can get a linux bootable floppy disc, but Eddie doesn't have a floppy drive.

[Sidders]

Ah, forgot that. You're definately screwed then Eddie.

[MK Chris]

Haha I bet Sidders spent ages searching on that assumption...

[Sidders]

Yeah, I did