I will soon be adding a version of Linux Puppy to my main PC. I have read all the info on repartitioning the hard drive, once I receive the disc. That appears straight forward enough so hopefully won't have any problems partitioning and installing Puppy.
In anticipation of working on this project I thought it best to clean up what is presently on my "C" drive. I had hoped to restore the hard drive to its original factory settings so I utilized the Compaq Recovery program, but I ran into a problem.
First of all, I have a Compaq Presario S400NX purchased in 2003; am running XP SP2; have replaced the CD/DVD RW; my floppy disc gave up the ghost some time back so I have to use the F2 key on startup. There is a System Restore Package in my "D" drive and I have the discs as backup.
In using the Compaq Recovery program, I did a "System Recovery" instead of the "Destructive Recovery", which would have put it back to factory original settings. Now I cannot rerun the Compaq Recovery program without getting the message "A recovery set has already been created for this PC. You are not allowed to create another set." Then there is a button to exit the program.
Can anyone give me a hint how I can restore the comp? I am a bit concerned that the CD/DVD RW/R+ drive I now have will not be available once I restore the system to original. I do have the driver for it on disc, but how do you load a driver from disc for the disc drive that might not be recognized? I have a USB stick, so could copy the driver there then install it from the stick, so that is a possibility.
Can't wait to get Linux installed so I can get away from all of this Windows [CENSORED].
Any help in this would be greatly appreciated.
THX,
AlaskanWolf

In order to get around the 1 copy limit in the compaq recovery program, you need to delete the following files:

/windows/SMINST/hpcd.sys on the windows install and

/hpcd.sys on the recovery partition root.

You can't easily do that from within windows. IIRC those files are not viewable or deletable from within windows explorer. Ironically, the easiest way to accomplish this task is to use a linux livecd like sidux which has ntfs-3g support which allows you to write to, and delete files from, an NTFS partition. With linux, when you mount the NTFS partitions using ntfs-3g these files are seen and can be deleted. If you search the web, I think you will find other ways to get around this artificial limitation from within windows.

Windows doesn't require any special driver for optical drives like your CD/DVD RW/R+ drive. The software that comes with these drives is generally for viewing commercial dvds, cd/dvd burning software and possibly packet writing software. Basic cdrom/optical drive functionality(i.e. reading from a cd or dvd) is built into windows. Perhaps I'm not understanding your concern.

Thx, Kilgore, I just got brave and tossed the CD version of system restore in and got the whole system restored. From HD usage, looks like I should easily have 16 to 20 gigs for the Puppy Linux when it arrives. Still need to pickup a serial external modem since I can't seem to use the current Win Modem via the DSL live CD version of linux that I was trying out early on. You would think, after all the years I have been using comps, that I would know the best way to fix any comp problem is to just DO IT. *LOL*
TXH again,
Wolf