Recovery CD?...what good is it??

[John Prophet]

A few months back I bought a systemax Athlon 950 (slot A) computer. Its working fine but I am a little bit uncomfortable about not having a full WinMe CD. What exactly can a person do with a "recovery" CD. Besides some useless junk (systemax splashscreen images etc), the only thing on the CD that looks useful are 3 files...BootCat.Bin...BootImg.Bin...ENGWINME.Pak. What can I do with these files. Suppose my hard drive dies..would I be able to rebuild/reinstall to a new hard drive from these files? What exactly is a PAK file? How do I open it? Id like to format the hard drive..repartition and set up a dual boot with W2000, but I need to know what the recovery CD is gonna do for me first. Thanks!

[Jim9999]

It sounds like you have a lot of good questions, but you're asking the wrong people. Ask the folks you got it from. We can only guess what they provided.

OEMs are required to provide you with the means to get back to where you were when you bought the computer. Microsoft can't require them to provide you with a full CD. They tried that years ago, but got in trouble for it http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

Some recovery CDs do nothing more than format the drive and restore the system to its out-of-box-state.

Others, like ones that come from Sony, can do a clean reinstall into a new folder, reformat the drive, all kinds of stuff.

The short answer is "it depends." Go to the folks that gave you the CD (the MB or HD folks) and ask them what it does.

Or try booting from it and see what options it gives you. I've never heard of one just booting and starting an unstoppable format... but who knows.

[DanU]

UGH... I hate recovery disks. You're much better off with the WinME CDROM.

The recovery disk is basically an image of your hard drive. If you ever want to restore your HD back to what it had originally... then format your HD and boot from the recovery CD. It will reinstall everything onto the HD... for better or for worse.