Returning to the Factory Installed Image
Should you ever feel the need, you can restore your system to it’s factory default image at any time using these discs by booting from the
System Recovery Disc. When the System Recovery disc boots, you will have some options to choose from:
You can recover just the C: drive, leaving your D: drive in-tact. Useful if you want to get back to the factory default image without
affecting your D: drive which probably has all your personal files on. Alternatively you can recover both the C: and D: drives. In either
case, you have the option to adjust the sizes of the partitions for C: and D: although this adjustment is fairly restrictive; you can’t set the
C: drive smaller than 60GB (!) and you can’t create additional partitions (although you could adjust your partitions later with a third party
tool like Symantec’s Partition Magic). You also have the option to remove the hidden recovery partition at this point.
Your other option is to do a complete factory reset which restores the hidden recovery partition from the DVDs recreates and restores
both the C: and D: drives to their factory default sizes and content. This works from the recovery DVDs even if you have completely
erased and the recovery partition and/or changed the partition table in other ways. I used this method to get back to the factor image for
the purpose of creating this guide.
