eMachines sells a computer, the EL1300G, that doesn't come with a restore disk; neither does it have a restore partition.

Back in the past, all computers came with either no operating system, or disc(s) for the operating system. Eventually, this evolved into the "restore disc" which was produced by the manufacturer, and contained not only the operating system, but bundled applications.

To shave costs (and avoid tech having to mail out more restore discs) they came up with the "recovery partition" which was simply a restore disc stored on a partition that could be used by pressing a key during boot-up. You could produce a new restore disc from this partition, but, generally, the partition alone was used to fix damaged installations.

Now, eMachines has a new idea - no restore partition at all. Instead, if you need to restore, you have to buy a disc from eMachines.

They turned an expense into revenue, and also created motivation to build machines that fail.