If you walk into a retail store…no they usually do not, in fact, they come with just a restore partition and** no disks at all**.
What BB did was to create the disks for the customer using the units own recovery cd creator and blank media BB’s shop keeps on hand.
That is not OEM branded media, its the same thing you or I might do for a customer who lacks restore disks but has a restore media builder tool.
Reminds me of the good old days with DOS when I had an application partition and a data partition. Of course back then the only people with 40 MB drive were sysops. Why I remember one time was using telnet and . . .
GET OFF MY LAWN!!
You had telnet? why, I rmember loading the Telex paper tape, and we were so lucky we got those 8 inch floppies, but the hard part was telling the hard-sectored with all the holes from the soft-sectored…
Uphill both ways in the snow…
(You had a hole in the ground? Luxury! We lived in a lake… )
Genuine OEM should come with a sticker indicating that it was licensed by Microsoft.
But, you still have to make your own recovery/install disks.
Just buy the Windows OEM disks from newegg or tigerdirect. Then download all of the current drivers and updates for the particular laptop from the laptop manufacturer and burn them to a CD/DVD. If you have the ability you could create a slipstream install disk from both and Bob’s your uncle.
FWIW, the last laptops I bought direct from Lenovo almost two years ago. They had a hidden partition so I could reimage the machines, if needed. But if the hard drive died, I would be SOL. And no, I did not create recovery/install disks as manufacturers ask you to do when you first buy their machine. I’ve never done that with any of my machines. Instead, I contacted IBM (IBM may have sold their laptop manufacturing process to Lenovo, but everything else is still IBM supported and maintained) and asked for a copy of their master OEM install disks for my particular laptop model. They used to be free years ago. They’re not anymore. No worries. For $50 I got a copy of the OEM master disks, and excellent service, too.
Since then, I took the plunge with one of the laptops. After backing up both hard drives (yes, my laptop has two internal hard drives), I used the OEM master disks and reimaged. No worries. Worked like a charm. First thing after reimaging was to download/install all the updates. No problems. Then I reinstalled all my applications (Yes, I have all of them). Copied by data from the backups and I was good to go.
At least here in my neck of the woods, they charge for this.