PC Maintenance Class 7: Term 2

When it comes to the point where you want to wipe a computer back to factory defaults, many machines these days come with a hidden partition on the harddisk that with a certain key combination will allow you to restore your computer.

What is a partition though?  Hard disk partition refers to the creation of logical divisions upon a hard disk that allows one to apply operating system-specific logical formatting.  Or in simpler terms, disk partitioning is the act or practice of dividing the storage space of a hard disk drive into separate data areas known as partitions. A partition editor program can be used to create, delete or modify these partitions. In Windows 7 we use the Disk Management tool, in the Computer Management console.

For example an 80GB harddisk, could be partitioned in half, the first half being drive C: and the second half being drive D:

For the sake of argument it is like the computer has two seperate drives.

Why might we do this?  One reason might be to seperate the System data (Windows) from the Users data (contents of My Documents).  These days though it is far cheaper to buy a second disk, and besides if something happened to the harddisk of which has multiple partitions, you’d loose all the data.

However, manufacturers sometimes set aside a minimal amount of diskspace in a partition to restore the computer back to its factory state. The size of such partitions can vary, be are usually somewhere in the region of 5-20gb, which isnt a tremendous amount of space to loose off something like a modern day 250 or 500GB drive.

The example we used in class, was my faithfull RM F-Series computer. In the case of the RM F-Series, when it boots, you see displayed in the upper left hand corner of the screen, the characters RMR….at this point you are given a few moments to access the partition for restore purposes.  To access the partitions, you need to press both Shift keys at that point. If you are too slow, you will have to reboot and try again.

The restore menu allows you to double check the intregity of the backup image, and typically takes about 10 minutes to restore, back to a state as it was when you first unpacked your new computer!