Nobody has EVER asked this before? Or are my habits are catching up with me...

[Shay D]

After searching over and over (and I consider myself fairly good at it) I have never seen this question asked. I've seen thousands and thousands of people requesting factory restore images and have seen even more, buying off of eBay their original recovery disks.
I have access to hundreds of decommissioned, used, upgraded throw away drives, etc and wonder:

Can a computer model be conclusively identified by it's contents on a factory restore partition?

Is there a way to know what kind of computer - make, model, style, etc that the recovery partition files are intended for?

People pay enormous money just to have a restore disc for their "Dell Optiplex 980" (example, only) and I see 10 or 15 recovery partitions a day. It drives me crazy good people can't find original software to restore their own computer.

I'm calling in the black belts here... show me your Kung Fu...

 

[Someone Somewhere]

I don' think so. Manufacturers tend to make the recovery partitions as wide-supporting as possible, so that they don't have to stock fifty different pre-imaged HDDs for each CPU/GPU/display combination.

 

[SinxarKnights]

Pretty much the same response as Someone Somewhere. Depending on the manufacturer, the recovery partition is actually just a copy of the OS with all the bloatware and sometimes a huge library of drivers in the case of offline recovery.

I mean there is nothing stopping you from trying to look at the data and find out, it could be as simple as a file identifying the PC it is installed on with a list of drivers to install.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

You could very probably identify the computer manufacture from the recovery image, but not the specific model.

For example, the recovery image (and the recovery DVDs) for my Toshiba laptop is/are compatible with several different Toshiba models as is clear from the info printed on the face of the discs.

Incidentally, I bought the discs direct from Toshiba and they were by no means "enormous money", only £13 for the set of two dual-layer DVDs.

Anyone who pays "enormous money" for them is getting ripped-off by third-parties.

 

[Shay D]

You could very probably identify the computer manufacture from the recovery image, but not the specific model.

For example, the recovery image (and the recovery DVDs) for my Toshiba laptop is/are compatible with several different Toshiba models as is clear from the info printed on the face of the discs.

Incidentally, I bought the discs direct from Toshiba and they were by no means "enormous money", only £13 for the set of two dual-layer DVDs.

Anyone who pays "enormous money" for them is getting ripped-off by third-parties.

By enormous money, I mean the total spent by the thousands and thousands of people buying those disks...
Somewhere, albeit the machine, bios or recovery disk, is a file that says the machine make, model type, etc. If a clean install is done from a retail version of an operating system, the system's name and details are considerably lacking. I'm suspecting that there is a file somwhere that provides model information to Device Manager, SysInfo, Performance Screens, etc. These are parts that have nothing to do with the sum.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

That info is in the BIOS. You can go there even without an HDD installed and probably see it.

All that means is the recovery disk includes manufacturer-specific software to read from the BIOS.

 

[neiler0847]

The question that comes to mind for me is "why would you care"? What are you trying to accomplish?