Patent ID: 8347137

Claim:
A method for providing full operating system capabilities to computer hardware without an operating system, the method comprising: (a) launching a first (recovery) operating system having limited capabilities; (b) transferring control to recovery software located within the recovery operating system; (c) initializing hardware devices of the computer hardware; (d) selecting a source storage for restoration of partitions or hard disk drives including a second operating system, the second operating system being restored to a destination storage device of the computer hardware; (e) establishing a connection over a network to the source storage; (f) selecting backups within the source storage for restoration, the backups including a file-level backup, image of file system metadata and boot code for initial operating system load; (g) transferring image data based on a bitmap of data blocks stored in the image portion of the backups; (h) initiating a transfer of the second operating system data from the selected source storage to the destination storage device; (i) restoring the second operating system to the computer hardware; (j) modifying the second operating system to enable the second operating system to configure its environment and hardware devices; and (k) substituting drivers of the computer hardware.