Recently bought, for a friend, a PB 6050- Pentium 2.5, 512RAM,80 G H/D, Win XP Home. Enquired of the dealer where the restore CDs were and was informed that the restore was on the H/D with a built-in restore function. Should I prefer a separate CD it could be burned from the machine itself. Two major errors here - 1. believing a Dixons salesman (I know, I know!!!!!) and 2. believing that the Packard Bell 12 months on site warranty was worth anything!!
As with two previous XP machines, I set it up as dual boot XP and W98. This one did not like the process and went into dead screen mode. Eventually finaigled it back into life with two partitions but only the XP drive working. No problem!! just use the built-in restore function - guess what? ... Right! it doesn't work. The process halts on a Dos screen with a pulsing cursor and no response to any input. Tried to make the recovery CDs - same result. E-mails to Packard Bell are all ignored (apparently this is absolutely standard) and enquiries at Dixons (good joke!) get a "go to this Helpline" reply - said Helpline costing £1GBP per minute and with all the usefulness of a chocolate fireguard - again, apparently, absolutely standard.
So, to the query. Does anyone know how to access the 'hidden' partition containing the recovery files? I can see it and it is a FAT 32 (presumably W98) folder. XP, being NTFS, can't access it and the much vaunted restore function obviously doesn't. Any suggestions welcome
Two suggestions...
1. DON'T BUY ANYTHING FROM THE PSG GROUP!!
2. If the above is too late and you have a similar machine, make your recovery CDs (and TEST them) NOW !!!