said by jansson_mark
:said by Name Game
:My advice to anyone who buys a new PC or laptop especially some of those Dell's

would be to wipe it clean, reformat the whole drive and then have a tech reinstall the OS..
Unfortunally some manufactorers/resellers do NOT provide you with clean install XP cdroms, but rather their OWN restore cdroms...or in some cases simply some bizarre "recovery feature" (like hidden image stored in unpartitioned hdd space) that can only be activated with some bizarre programX inside the computer. This sucks. Really.
All what I want from manufactorer is XP:s install cdrom and possibly the drivers disk (or simply mentions about what drivers are needed). Thats all I need.
Know what you mean. The restore info isnt so much on unpartioned space its on a hidden (only from windows) partion. Its visable on most through good old fdisk if not fdisk its visable from a linux boot or live cd. Been a while sense i used fdisk but i beleive it has a option in there some where to create a hidden partion. Or maybe you simply leave them as a inactive partion.