HP and IBM ditch recovery disks

Despite a barrage of complaints from customers, Hewlett-Packard is unrepentant over its decision to scrap Windows XP recovery disks for its Pavilion PCs.

An unapologetic statement from the company said moving recovery data to a partition on the hard drive is now standard industry practice.

"HP believes this provides its customers with a convenient and easy recovery process, eliminating the need to use an additional system recovery CD," the statement read.

The company has refused to be drawn on specific cases, particularly the issue of users who have suffered hard drive failure or divided their hard drive to add a second operating system, and been unable to recover vital data from the partition.

HP received support from an unexpected quarter when IBM, admitted it has also been phasing out recovery CDs over the last year.

Peter Sutherland, IBM EMEA product manager, said customers were partly to blame for losing or throwing away disks and then demanding more copies when they needed them.

"No-one ever thinks they're going to use them [recovery CDs] so they throw them away," he told silicon.com. "There's a cost associated with adding a CD to a system, particularly when they're hardly ever used."

But rival manufacturers Compaq and Dell have refuted the idea of scrapping the disks.

Gavin Duncan, European product manager for Dell Dimension, said: "We've always shipped our machines with a recovery CD for the operating system and we've no plans to change."

Dell toyed with a virtual recovery policy on its Windows ME and Windows 98 PCs - which included a system snapshot on a partition as well as the standard recovery disks - but ditched the idea with the arrival of XP.

"If you use the recovery disks you'll lose all the factory installed software, so [with ME and 98] it was better to recover from the partition," said Duncan. "But with Windows XP you don't need to do that, as it takes its own system snapshot."

Duncan said he had no objection to users partitioning their hard drive to add a second OS. "It's their machine, they can do what they like," he said.

Compaq confirmed that it ships all PCs with recovery CDs.