Recovery partitions

Manufacturers of laptops may give a recovery disc or may not depending on their policy. If their policy is not to provide the recovery disc, they put the factory installation of Windows to the separate partition along with an utility that can deploy this particular OS installation.

Such a partition containing the OS is stored in the end of the drive and hidden from the OS by the means of Host Protected Area. The possible course of actions to recover a laptop containing Host Protected Area is:

• you press certain keys when your computer starts up
• BIOS discards HPA limitations
• the system is loaded from the appeared recovery partition
• a pre-installed program runs from this partition. Such a tool reformats the entire hard drive and puts the factory Windows installation to the drive.When the recovery process is finished, HPA is again reset.

After this process is done the laptop would be as good as new, software-wise. It should be noted that  HPA is one of the reasons a hard drive shows less capacity than expected – read more here.

And one more thing – one shouldn’t confuse two notions of partition recovery and recovery partition, because the latter is a repair process during data recovery.