Recovery Cd on Hard Drive.

[firepony]

i recently got a new hp laptop and it didn't come with a DVD cause it claims to have all it needs on the hard drive. this method doesn't make me feel safe. is there a way i can transfer the DVD from the hard drive onto an actual DVD. there should be a legal way since i technically paid for the vista install on my laptop so why cant i have a DVD to keep it safe? i am worried that my hard drive will crash or die bring the rescue DVD with it. any help is appreciated. thanks in advance.

[xcorvis]

Originally Posted by Firepony

i recently got a new hp laptop and it didn't come with a DVD cause it claims to have all it needs on the hard drive. this method doesn't make me feel safe. is there a way i can transfer the DVD from the hard drive onto an actual DVD. there should be a legal way since i technically paid for the vista install on my laptop so why cant i have a DVD to keep it safe? i am worried that my hard drive will crash or die bring the rescue DVD with it. any help is appreciated. thanks in advance.

It probably has a "recovery partition" on the hard drive. I bet you could take an image of the partition and burn it to DVD - but it's not going to work like a normal Windows install DVD. An expert might be able to make something useful of it, but you're probably not going to be able to do anything with it.

You should try calling HP customer service and ask if there's a way to get a recovery DVD or Windows installation disk. It might be a few bucks for shipping.

[davmoo]

Originally Posted by Firepony

is there a way i can transfer the DVD from the hard drive onto an actual DVD.

Generally with HP machines they give you an option to make at least one set (and probably only one set) of installation DVDs/CDs. I can't remember exactly what they call it because I don't have a HP machine handy at the moment. But look through your start menu and it should be there somewhere.

[tokenuser]

Originally Posted by davmoo

Generally with HP machines they give you an option to make at least one set (and probably only one set) of installation DVDs/CDs. I can't remember exactly what they call it because I don't have a HP machine handy at the moment. But look through your start menu and it should be there somewhere.

"HP Backup and recovery Manager" ... it will guide you thought the process of burning a recovery CD (DVD?). here should be a companion program "HP Backup Partition Remover" that will then recover the space from the backup partition for regular use - it should give you 5-6GB back on the HD.

[freakazoid12]

Originally Posted by Firepony

i recently got a new hp laptop and it didn't come with a DVD cause it claims to have all it needs on the hard drive. this method doesn't make me feel safe. is there a way i can transfer the DVD from the hard drive onto an actual DVD. there should be a legal way since i technically paid for the vista install on my laptop so why cant i have a DVD to keep it safe? i am worried that my hard drive will crash or die bring the rescue DVD with it. any help is appreciated. thanks in advance.

Provided it's a standard filesystem, just on a hidden partition, you should be able to use something like Drive Image XML (or one of the programs mentioned in the episode) to snag an image of the whole system in it's current state.

Whatever you do, be it the above solution or one of the others mentioned in the thread i'd make multiple copies, DVD(+/-)R media can go bad over time.