I find it hard to condemn the Gateway lady as much as the rest of you. She was brusque and unsympathetic, but she was also just quoting the rules as her management had laid them out for her. The underlying attitude of Gateway was much worse--they are the ones that took away the disk drive space, not her. Consider also that she probably makes $9-10 per hour, and maybe the customer before cursed her out because he was such an idiot that he couldn't figure out where to put the power cord in. In this day and age, it's very rare to get a tech rep that speaks English with an American accent, so...let's count our blessings. p.s. I'll bet you can restore everything from the CDROM (or DVD), including the backup partition. That's the way it works on my HP computer and my eMachines computer too.