Hi

I earlier wanted to format my Lenovo laptop (with vista home basic SP1) but then dropped the idea when i found out i had not received the vista OS disc with the laptop.

Now i discovered tht a recovery cud be made from my computer itself through the recovery partition, but when i checked, the recovery partition SCREAMS THAT ITS 100% FREE! , although I have never formatted it since i bought it!
It was my understanding that a recovery is pre-installed...

Now i need to know if a recovery is still possible....!

As a bonus, my DVD optical drive is also not working!

Please help!

Thanks in advance!

As a little addition to what Rich says, here is a tutorial on how to use free Macrium. It appears on the Win7 forum but works the same in Vista.

Imaging with free Macrium - Windows 7 Forums

thank you for ur valued replies guys!

but the issue is that I DO want to reset my computer to the default condition it was in when i bought it. currently my drivers are all messed up, and i'm not able to reinstall them either. theres many instances of softwares n games that i cant get rid of even through add/remove programs and complete deletion of the files n folders.

in short the pc has gone nuts and i'm trying to wipe the slate clean..!

now since it didn't come with a vista installation disk i was kinda hoping the recovery drive wud help me, but since it says that there's no info on it, i'd like to know IF I CAN RECOVER THE DEFAULT SETTINGS...

any ideas how..?

thanks for trying to helping out richc46 !

unfortunately the F11 thing didn't work ...guess it was for older systems. n after countless hours of surfing the forums for a solution, it finally dawned on me to CALL the lenovo support (duh!).

but sadly, the tech support guy said tht since i had made an extra partition in addition to the two measly partitions tht come as company standard; and because the company is too cheap to provide the users with a dvd of the OS tht has been rightfully bought by the customer, ...i can't use the recovery partition to return my pc back to the default setting!

this is just outrageous, aint it!? i mean who wud keep just two partitions!!? n if that was the case, they shud put "DON'T CHANGE THE NO OF PARTITIONS" on the dam wallpaper!! cuz i'm sure as hell tht no salesman wud warn u abt this when u buy the stupid product!


oh and another thing... the drivers on the lenovo website havent been updated since 2007-08! this company is full of bull.... !

Hmm, it does not look good. Unfortunately there is no legal Vista.iso on the web - see here.. That is strange though since there is a legal Windows 7 .iso on the web. But that does not help you.

One option you might want to entertain is to download and install the free Windows 8 Consumer Preview. That works very well and will be operational until mid Jan. 2012 - but it is a bit different. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/consumer-preview

Another option you have, of course, is to find someone who has a Vista installation disc with your edition (e.g. Home Premium). Install with that and apply the product key that is on the COA sticker of your PC.