[So][HP Tattoo]I found something VERY interesting at work today...

It was near the end, and a customer had returned a machine saying it was booting windows 98 when it was supposed to be booting WinXP 2005 MC. The machine had 2GB of ram and was running a dual core; I was veeeery skeptical. I was like WTF, so I decided since it was interesting and it was nearly time to go home, I was going to boot it up and see if yet another customer had a PEBKAC error.

I saw the win98 splash screen flash once, then it displayed "HP TATTOO UTILITY, INPUT MACHINE MODEL NUMBER" then it bumped me to a C prompt.

I was like "WTF", so I cranked UBCD into the drive, opened up DOSviewer, and started searching around. I opened a bin dir, and found about 1000 files bat and bin files, each with model numbers on them. Opened another DIR and found about 4 dozen codenames for tattoo's. Then I got it.

This is a setup so you can overwrite the BIOS ROM config register so you can install any damn hp recovery CD onto any HP machine you want. Very handy, if you run a shop that resells machines and you want to skip over the $30 per recovery set price.

Apparently it runs off of an autorun.ini file...

Which means exactly what it says I say it means.

Yep, that's right. Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can crank this sucker onto a CD and make her bootable, and see what kind of functionality I can get (and see if I can avoid frying BIOS ROM chips...:x). I've got a smallish library of recovery CD's and if I can nearly match up model numbers I can start restoring PC's with the inproper recovery CD's, install the drivers manually, then burn the customer a driver CD for when they restore and save like $30 a machine. I don't know how effective it'll be but my boss is interested and like "get it done".

Anyone ever hear of a utility like this?

It sounds like the time spent on the extra work is worth more than $30.

Multiply $30 by the 10 machines that are on the shelf right now that need restores, then by the 20 a month that have a bad restore partition.

yeah... and you are still spending 50$ extra in time per machine to do these restores because you need to find the proper drivers, etc.

I guess if you would be doing nothing with that extra time it doesn't matter.

:P Bench space, plugs, and internet access is cheap, and I can find all the necessary drivers and burn it to disk in about 10 minutes. They're HP machines dude, it isn't like a custom build where you have to pull every card out and locate drivers by chip ID numbers.

i think there should be a site for restore cd's. I have a good collection of IBM ones ...