Today when I went to use the recovery disk on my Toshiba laptop, in order to prove to Toshiba that the DVD-RW drive is bad, I received the following message (printed in ASCII art): WRONG MACHINE

If I ran the disks in Windows, I got a similar message telling me that the recovery CD Rom was not for my machine, but that it was built for a Satellite 5200 only. Interestingly enough, the machine IS a Satellite 5200. Since I had run into this once before, I searched the net to find the utility that I had found the other time. No such luck, but I did find that many people seemed to be complaining of the same problem. Many complained of Toshiba’s help desk not being of any assistance, and some even saying that the machine needed to be taken to a “authorized repair depot”. There were a few people that had chosen to capitalize on this, and offered to send you the utility on a CD for a price. Since I knew this wasn’t true last time, I did more searching, and I still couldn’t find the utility.

On a lark, I decided to look at the files that were on the disk, undocumented of course. In the root directory, you will find, if your disk(s) are like mine, a utility called chgdmi.exe When you click on it, you will get a box that asks you to enter the new DMI name. In my case, I entered “Satellite 5200” then the utility exits. If you now try to run the recovery disks, they will work.

So please, don’t -pay- people to send you disks, or take the machine to a repair depot where they will charge you to reinstall the OS.