Hello Steve O, and welcome to Vista Forums.

This tutorial will show you how to create a Recovery Disc of you your own that can be used to repair Vista. It cannot be used to reinstall Vista though.

Create a Recovery Disc


You should have a recovery partition that will allow you to make a set of Recovery CD/DVDs of your own though that you can use to reinstall Vista with if needed. What is the brand and model of your laptop? I'll post back instructions for how to from the OEMs website.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Hello Steve, welcome to Vista forums!

I believe if you check into it you'll find that the D: partition is the recovery partition.
Look in the start menu to see if you can find an option to create a set of recovery discs.
You can also return it to the way it was when it was new from the recovery partition.

Keep us informed!




Later Ted

Ok Steve,

I found this for Acer on how to create a Vista Recovery CD from your D: Recovery Partition. This will only let you reinstall Vista though. You will still need to create the other recovery DVD from the tutorial I posted above to run a startup repair though.

• Open the Acer eRecovery Management program
• Click the burn disk button at the bottom
• Click the create factory default disk button
• Put a blank DVD in the drive when prompted and follow the remaining on screen instructions

Hope this helps,
Shawn