Some PC vendors are making a practice of creating a small partition on a system's primary hard drive in which to store the systems' original restoration information. Generally these partitions are 5 - 12 Gigabytes in size and are preformatted during the manufacturing process. The practice appears to have replaced the inclusion of a restoration CD for some PC vendors. While it may be considered a convenience by some to have the operating system and driver backups loaded on the local hard drive, the practice should not be considered a safe backup practice for these system files. A hard drive failure would likely find many people without a way to restore or reloaded the operating system onto a new hard drive. PC Pitstop recommends making a copy of the restoration data onto a DVD or other external media.

Small Drive Partitions - Prevalence by PC Vendor and Processing MHz

Small Drive Partitions - Prevalence by PC Vendor and Operating System

Small Drive Partitions - Average Partition Size by PC Vendor

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