@mrbongo, I admire you Patience on this, most people would have given up and ended up hacking their System, makes you wonder how many people have actually bought pre-installed windows and ended up in the same situation.
Well Done!!
I think the most frustrating aspect is that if I owned a different brand of Notebook I could have simply made a call and used recovery disks available, the only task would be data retrieval.
If something is worth doing then it deserves a similar degree of effort.
If I hadn't come across the excellent help on here, I would still be sat scratching my head.
It's funny you mention that because I didn't want to discourage you since it's slightly different but was tempted to link the most egregious thread I've ever seen about OEMS which is still a top search result for Samsung:
http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/200607-new-laptop-changing-partition-disks-4.html
It would be sweet justice is you worked with SIW2 to find a way to mount and run the Samsung Recovery partition, which we could see live on via Google to spite their tech support parody troupe which actually told Nicole she had to buy new licenses for ALL of the software is the reimaged her HD.
God that experience sounds like a similar nightmare.
To be honest, how I felt about Samsungs 'assistance' was that this fine detail was almost small print that they don't tell people about and when you find out, it's too late.
Having read over some of the manuals and guides that came included with my laptop, it seems that for some, they do supply the recovery disc (as in Nicoles case) and for others, your only hope is having the recovery partition and Samsungs Recovery solution.
The two go hand in hand so if you don't have one of these - or like me, you do but it's on a duff hard drive - then there is no recovery option.
I've always compared laptops capabilities when buying to make sure I'm not saving money but creating headaches by buying a cheap model that I will spend more time and money trying to mod. And while the R530 was probably at the cheaper end, it had what I needed so did not see this s**tstorm coming.
At the very least, I expect to be able to factory restore if everything goes wrong. And while I'm not averse to getting my hands dirty and figuring it all out, there's gotta be people out there with basic computer skills who just want to be able to pop in a disc and go through simple steps to recover their PC.
Telling people to buy new OS and software is poor advice. Imagine losing your house keys and a having to move house and buy replacement furniture.
There's also conflicting advice given by the retailer PC World as the person I spoke to said re:recovery disks that if my laptop was purchased less than 30 days ago (as Nicoles was) I could take it to store to have use of the Holy Grail Recovery Disc.
I guess in her case they knew that she'd already tried, the partition was gone and sensibly replaced.
Booooo Samsung! I used to really like your stuff but now I doubt I would buy again.
I was hoping to see this through as well.