Recovery of the laptops supplied without a recovery disc

Laptop makers are divided into those who users a recovery CD (which often gets lost) and those makers who do not provide. Vendors who don't provide the recovery disc to their consumers usually place the original installation of Windows to the special invisible partition along with a program that can deploy this OS installation.
Such a partition is placed in the end of the drive and it becomes invisible to the operating system by the means of HPA.

The recovery process in case of a laptop containing Host Protected Area can be the following:

• you press certain set of keys when the system starts up
• the BIOS discards HPA
• the OS is loaded from the appeared recovery partition
• a factory reset utility runs from this partition. Such a tool reformats the hard disk and copies the original copy of Windows to the drive.
• As the recovery process is finished, HPA is set again. 

 After the recovery the laptop would be as good as new.