Maj.Striker said:
One of those disks absolutely has to be a copy of the operating system...as Quarto has mentioned it may be in the guise of a "recovery" disk or such but they absolutely cannot sell you a computer without a disk for the operating system. It's illegal in a majority if not all of the United States to not include the operating system disks. (Unless, of course, you purchased it without the operating system installed).
Actually, it's just a "recovery" disk. And it's perfectly legal, actually. It's illegal to not include a *license* of the operating system, but that does not have to mean a physical CD of the operating system. It could just mean that little shrinkwrapped piece of cardboard with the CD key representing the license. Now, they usually include a way to recover the drive back to factory installs to save on tech support (instead of having to solve problems, they can say "Press F2 and proceed to recover back to factory install, then tell me if it happens again" - note the lack of "you'll lose all your data"), which can be CD, a BIOS "feature" or some other method. Now, Gateway and Dell I believe will sell you a recovery CD if you corrupt the recovery partition.
Microsoft does not allow OEM providers to include recovery CDs anymore because they end up on eBay and sold without licenses and all that stuff. Whitebox providers, who pay a bit more for their OEM licenses, are only allowed to sell CDs with hardware.
All the providers can give you is a "recovery" CD that basically reformats the hard drive and reinstalls the operating system. And oftentimes, it limits itself to the exact hardware combination that the computer was sold - change the video card, and you often can't "recover" your computer.
And technically, Microsoft requires people who reformat the computer and install their version of Windows to have a license for that copy of Windows. So you can't use the OEM-provided license with the Windows you just reformatted the computer with (!!!). So if you Ghost on a new image (like all good IT departments), that Windows license has to be purchased separately).
So, find a real copy of Windows somewhere. We won't tell on you.