zeldaber:
The first three sentences of your description of "restore disk" is accurate
_ONLY_ for some manufacturers, and _ONLY_ for some models sold by those
manufactures.
Some companies that currently provide a "restore disk" as you describe
were _NOT_ doing so two years ago (when the OP purchased his computer).
Some companies eschew hidden partitions on hard drives and provide an actual
set of restore CDs (or DVD). Currently shipping HP computers, upon the very
first boot, offer the option, to create a full set of restore CDs using the
built-in CD burner. The Gateway laptop that I purchased two years ago came
with a non-customized windows XP on CD, a CD with drivers, and a CD with
customized Gateway trouble-shooting software.