Question about Toshiba recovery CD...

I am thinking of customizing a Satellite M50. Does it come with a recovery CD that automatically reinstalls all the "bloatware"? Or does it have just the Windows CD?

If its the 1st option, is it possible to use an OEM install cd and then change the CD key to whatever comes with the Toshiba?

I'm asking because I want to be able to reformat the drive and start fresh without all the junk (plus I want at least 2 partitions).

 

Yes - unfortunately, Toshiba loads all their bloatware onto their recovery discs. However, you should still be able to make partitions on the HD with Toshiba's recovery CDs. If you so desire, you would be able to load a fresh Windows CD without all the bloatware, but you'd have to pay for it yourself. If you're going to buy your own Windows discs, I suggest buying XP Home with the M50 and then uploading the XP Pro upgrade into it later - cheaper than buying a new XP Home/Pro pack.

 

Note on that one, I noticed my M60 came with a Recovery DVD instead of 3 recovery CD's like my last one, , at least they made something simple for once

Matt

 

So I own a Toshiba Sattelite M55 and I tried doing a clean install with a Windows XP CD; not the Recovery CD that came with my laptop. However, everytime I try to boot from Windows CD, my laptop hangs.

Does Toshiba only allow you to reformat using the Recovery CD? Is there anyway I can reformat using my Windows XP CD and not the Recovery CD?

 

Moreover, I was able to do a clean reformat using a Windows XP Professional CD on my Sony Vaio, and then proceeded to install the necessary drivers from the Sony Website. I was hoping to do the same thing with my Toshiba laptop but I'm having a lot of trouble trying to do the clean install with my Windows XP CD.

I can get as far as the Windows Setup blue screen when I boot from my CD drive, but then it starts loading all my drivers and then it says it's trying startup Windows while it's still in the blue Setup screen. This is when my Laptop hangs.

Because I couldn't get around this problem, I just tried upgrading my Toshiba laptop from the factory set XP Home Edition to XP Pro using my Windows XP Professional CD. However, it wouldn't even allow me to do that, and it caused an error that says my setup can't run because my Home edition is a later version than my Pro version (I have a Windows Pro XP SP1 CD.) I did not have any similar problems with my Sony Desktop as I just upgraded to SP2 after my clean reformat.

Could someone please tell me if it's at all possible to do a clean reformat with my Windows CD because I'm really getting annoyed with all the junk bloatware on my recovery CD.

Sorry for replying to myself. Just wanted to give some more background info about my problem.

Thanks!

 

I eventually figured out the problem. My copy of the Windows XP Pro Installer CD was damaged. When I popped in a different copy of the Windows XP Pro Installer CD, everything worked fine and I was able to do a clean format and install with it! Thank god for friends in high places!