[nzlug] recondition laptop windows licence revisited

[Simon Bridge]

On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 21:09 -0500, Craig Box wrote:
> >
> > AFAIK: thus created install media contains only the base system ...
> > though nobody knows what of the registry gets copied, third party stuff
> > didn't get a lookin.
> >
> > I think you cannot do this with vista (anybody) and I havn't seen such a
> > tool on my XP machine.
> 
> 
> If you get recovery files on your PC, it's normally the files from a CD
> image (check for C:\i386\ or a recovery partition) and a self-installation
> script.
> 
I see no C:\i386, but there is a C:\WINDOWS\I386 with lots of stuff in
it. Nothing that looks like an iso or raw CD image. No recovery
partition either. Of course - if I burned the content of this directory
to a CD, perhaps that's the recovery disk?

> While it's feasible that malware could target this partition and modify the
> recovery media, I've never heard of it being done.  People normally write
> the media to CD/DVD as one of the first things they do, hopefully before
> they get infected!

Looks like it's not as hard as, say, remastering the ubuntu iso. It's
not exactly something that would be easy to google for...