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Hi there,

i just received my new laptop DV9500t, and am quite happy with the item, except the fact that HP no more provide recovery disks/vista installation disks.
The system has come pre-configured with a dozen of useless applications and a partition that contains about 10gb worth of recovery material. however i do not want that as i need to format all partitions and custom partition the disk so i can have xp (75gb) as main os, vista as a test os (25gb) and opensuse (60gb).
Anyone know of a way to somehow create this setup with no installation disk for Vista? i have a create recovery tool to create some recovery disks with vista, but i dont want all the software again to be installed and would prefer to extract somehow the vista installation disk from that partition/disk.

Is there a way of doing this? Thanks in advance for ideas/replies

mike

Hello Mike,
I wish I could say that there was an easy way to do what you want to do. Basically you would have to buy a retail copy of Vista or XP. Fdisk and format the laptops hard drive using the retail install discs. Doing just a HP restore would put all the crap programs back on your computer

thanks tmagic for your reply.
i already have retail version of xp and recovery disks of xp. however i only had vista recovery bleeping disk. linux obviously have a download version which in either case is no problem.
there should be a way of getting rid of those useless apps that come bundled with. atleast my old hp laptop came with both xp install and recovery disk. why not anymore with new line of hp laptops? i mean i feel like i've been taken for a ride....
the thing is that i dunno where to start from like aswell. Should i start with format, then xp, then vista, and then finally linux? or vista-->xp-->linux?
also is it wise to use a 40-50gb shared partition as fat32 for all os's? i need also a shared space where all systems can write read from.
have dual hard drives. 1x160 and 1x250.

anyhow thanks

Hi again Mike,
you can use you XP install disk to repartition the laptop. There is no real reason to keep the FAT32 partition, if you don't plan to use the laptops recovery. This partition is used for the HP recovery software. That's why you no longer receive recovery discs