New Laptop, no Windows CD - can I rip it from the backup partition?

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daedal

Gawd
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May 10, 2005
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Hey guys n' gals,
I picked up a new Hewlett Packard Laptop a few days ago and it's been a blast. The only problem is it's loaded with HP branded junk. Now the laptop doesn't come with a recovery disk but there is a partition on the drive setup to recover from.

Question is, is it possible for me to just "extract" Windows from that partition without restoring all of the bundled "software"? If that's not possible, if I were to restore that default state (i.e., using the recovery to restore the image), is it possible to make a backup of Windows from there?

If not, another option I was thinking about was to restore the default image, clean it up real good and then make an image of that state to restore from instead of the bloated HP one. Any thoughts or free applications I should look at?

Thanks guys!
 
Unfortunately most of that HP system restore stuff does contain all their custom programs, and most times it's not possible to do a custom install.

Best and fastest way? Restore it, then do a system clean of all the junk.
 
Rocco123 said:
Unfortunately most of that HP system restore stuff does contain all their custom programs, and most times it's not possible to do a custom install.

Best and fastest way? Restore it, then do a system clean of all the junk.
Click to expand...
What if I were to do that, but once it's clean, the create a new image so I have a good one to restore from? Is that a possibility?
 
daedal said:
What if I were to do that, but once it's clean, the create a new image so I have a good one to restore from? Is that a possibility?
Click to expand...

Using Ghost or some such, yep.
But you couldn't use their restore procedure, although you might beable to store the image on the restore partition, but you'd have to use your own boot disk.
 
gigabyte1024 said:
Using Ghost or some such, yep.
But you couldn't use their restore procedure, although you might beable to store the image on the restore partition, but you'd have to use your own boot disk.
Click to expand...
Any free alternatives to Norton Ghost?
 
I just got a HP laptop 1.5 weeks ago and used a Dell OEM WinXP CD + key from the HP laptop to do the reinstall after ghosting the original factory disk load (~12GB on 3 DVD+RWs, max compression). I never even booted the original OS. :D I'm not really sure what software it came with other than the OS, but whatever it was is probably bloat.

To compare how much junk is pre-loaded on HP laptops, a Ghost image of my last Dell (Inspiron 6000) hard drive including the WinXP/MS Works/apps/etc and restore partition was "only" 4.2GB with max compression. :rolleyes:

On the plus side, this is my first new installation of WinXP on a laptop in about 3 years.
 
Every consumer HP I've ever seen has an option to burn your own image discs from the backup partition. Even the one I bought for my sister, that didn't come with a CD burner.
 
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