Meat Plow wrote:

On Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:42:58 -0400, Jamie
wrote:


some Laptops have a partition on the HD that has special set up
software at boot time to configure the proprietary onboard chips..
This also could be an issue..


What laptop(s) would have this feature?

Acers off the top of my head. Maybe not the current
ones.. But I had to correct an older one that did this.
The owner installed a newer OS, The process reported that
the current partition was not the primary one and asked if
he wish to make the install the primary one etc... etc..
And he did.....................
etc
All was going just fine until it was time to reboot, when
he did, windows could not find the CD rom, any longer.

To fix it, we move the HD to a USB external drive cable I have on
another PC and used the recover CD that restored the HD back to
original. Put it back in the laptop and then install the new OS over
the existing one. That worked out fine..

Take it for what you want, if you have been around long enough,
this isn't a new technique, things like this was done back in the
hay day to configure your HD, the device settings were on the HD
platter.