HP Recovery Partition

I got an HP desktop computer for Winter Solstice Festival Holiday, last year. It has a recovery partition that is suppose to rapidly rebuild Windows XP, but its availability has been rather inconsistent. In all fairness, it is because my system has always been a multi boot system.

In the process of ditching Vista, I reformatted the drive back to the factory default. As I rebuild the system, I tested the recovery partition to ensure that it was still working. It seems the secret is to keep the recovery partition as the last partition on the drive, but it must be a primary partition.

This means the disk is arrange similar to the following:

1 Primary Windows XP-M
2 Primary Linux /boot
4 Extended
5 Logical FAT-32 (data)
6 Logical NTFS (Win Apps)
7 Logical Linux LVM (F7)
3 Primary Recovery

The big trick is going to come when I try to re-install Vista as Logical partition number 8. Oooo... Won't that be interesting.