Compaq Recovery Partition
Everything from the OS disk is located on a hard drive recovery partition. With HP or Compaq you access recovery on restart by hitting the F10 key. You can recover applications, drivers, and the operating system to their factory shipped condition. You will need to reinstall and reconfigure any application that you installed, but it will not delete data files in its normal default mode.
Even though this recovery software takes up almost 600MB on average of the hard drive, it still requires cdrom discs be inserted into the machine to perform the actual recover.
You should create a Recovery Disc. Compaq allows you to create 1 set of recovery discs for your new computer. This is helpful in the event the recovery partition becomes corrupt or is accidentally deleted.
Compaq like other computer manufacturers have included a set of recovery discs with the purchase of a new computer in the past. In order to cut costs they new place a recovery partition on the hard drive, and give the customer the option of creating a set of recovery discs. Many customers never bother to create the recovery discs. Some of them never paid enough attention to realize it was an option. The practice of not including physical recovery media, actual recovery discs, is a bad practice in the industry and these computer manufacturers should ship actual recovery discs in the form of a DVD with the new computer system.
