I have a retail drive. Its a Memorex I bought at tigerdirect. Its pretty good quality, or I wouldnt have bought it for 300$ (dont tell my wife!). It cant be read at all. It has a bunch of files missing from the i386 folder, and the boot sector. I sont think I can recover it. . It came with a COA sticker, but it wasnt attached to the PC. Thats because I bought the product and CD OEM, seperately, It didnt come with the PC. Did you miss this? That's Windows 2000 for ia64 (Itanium). It *is* a Microsoft product. Nope. Its not Linux, because I wouldnt be asking this if it were linux...why? because I could download it. Yep, so its MS