Recovery Partion---Recovery Disks Installing and Upgrading Vista Discuss Recovery Partion---Recovery Disks in the Windows Vista forums; A few days ago I was here because I had lost "deleted" my recovery partition on the hard drive of my new HP (Vista Home Premium) notebook!!! I ...

[jkjk222]

A few days ago I was here because I had lost "deleted" my recovery partition on the hard drive of my new HP (Vista Home Premium) notebook!!! I had created the recovery disk (actually two DVD's), but this wouldn't let me recreate the recovery partition. Felix and Snuffy gave me some helpful advise, but it appeared I was out of luck for a recovery partition on the HD.

I DID have a recovery DVD that came with my new PC, but it did not have the four (4) options that were on the recovery disks I made myself, and it was obvious that if I ran it, I was going to loose EVERYTHING on the HD.

I finally bit the bullet, and recovered with the factory recovery disk. I was surprised to find that the entire process took ALMOST THREE HOURS !!!
This resulted in a complete format, and reinstall of VISTA.

The reason I'm writting this is to let everyone know that after the recovery, the "RECOVERY PARTITION" was back on the hard drive, just as it had been when I opened the box with the new computer. I was even able to make another set of recovery disks!!!

Everything is working fine now. I don't think this is "stop the presses!" news, but thought people might be interested in case they found themselves in the same position. Just be sure and BACKUP EVERYTHING FIRST, to a remote hard drive, DVD's or something else, cause it's ALL going to be gone after running the factory recovery disk. If anyone has questions, you can contact me at jkjk222@yahoo.com. Thanks again to Felix and Snuffy for their help.

[Buster]

Hi I use Acronis true image 10.0 this once setup will back up the full computer even the registration details and should be a lot quicker than the manufacturers discs this will have your have all your own personal details to the point of the last backup you made
you do need a second hard drive for this to work well but it can be backed up to dvd discs my computer restores in about twenty minutes with about 10 gig of info
if you make a fresh copy when you have the machine set to the way you want it should only take about ten minutes
you can also make a bootable disc in case of a system crash a restore from the bootable disk again it works better if you have two hard drives
you can also make incremental backup and restores ( individual parts )
works well for me and my familly saves me hours of work sorting out there computers my Grandson restores his with the copy I made when i built it for him and we do this by phone ( he is 3 hudred miles away) i just talk him through the process

[felix8406]

Excellent suggestion; the recovery partition or disks will performed a destructive recovery, as Jkjk222 stated, everything goes back to manufacture's configuration, including all the trash that was originally pre-installed. A backup is important as Buster suggested.

I don't use backup software, but if you don't have copies of all your applications, a backup is a must. I keep updated copies of all my data on separate internal and external hard drives, just in case I have to do a recovery.

If you used the recovery disk or partition, after the installation is completed, configure everything exactly the way you want it and then create an image of the HD, that way if you need to reinstall, the installation will not include all the junk that came pre-installed with the PC.