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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

> And with one minor tweak that doesn’t affect the system’s capabilities in any way

If that were the case, why would that feature even be included? Obviously it does impact the capabilities, when things go wrong.

Also interesting to note they call it a "minor tweak". What percentage of tablet (or laptop) users even know about a recovery image? I small fraction, I'd wager.

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They're referring to the recovery partition. And while most of the time you're never going to need such a thing, when you're dealing with a device like the Surface it's going to come in very handy when you do.

This is just a personal anecdote , but I've had a large number of Dell laptops (100+) which all seem to have recovery partitions rather than install media now days. Whenever something fails, it's been a hard drive hardware failure, In which case the recovery partition is completely useless.

I have never used a recovery partition successfully.

The fact that you have such a large number of laptops in your possession suggests to me that you're probably in a corporate IT setting (apologies if I'm wrong). In such a case, Hardware failures are probably going to be the most prevalent mode of failure for needing a system re-image, since software usage is going to be in-line with corporate policies. People aren't going to venture into warez sites, etc.

But for the average, non-technical user, I think you'd see a much higher incidence of needing a system re-image due to viruses, malware, spyware, etc.

But then the average user is likely to take it to any number of computer repair shops who might try the recovery partition, or they might just reimage from an OEM install disk they have lying around/available.

The people hosing their system like that aren't likely to be able to use a recovery partition. I would guess they'd take the computer to a shop to get it fixed.

The suggestion was that you can retain the recovery partition contents on another drive (eg a USB drive), which is something that supposedly can't be done on the MBA. [e: maybe you can.. although the link does not make it clear that it can be removed from the MBA's disk, and the point was really about the saved space]

I agree few will likely know about it, but that doesn't make it invalid, nor is the space saved irrelevant to those that do.

Or even better, Apple now lets you boot from the web using the built-in firmware for recovery...

See internet recovery: http://www.apple.com/osx/recovery/

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4848

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