Burning System Recovery CDs

A friend brought his laptop to me and asked me to fix it. I'm planning to reinstall Windows to get rid of whatever virus he has, but I have a problem. This is my friend's first computer, and when he first brought it home and the laptop prompted him to burn the recovery CDs, he didn't understand what it was for and just canceled it. Is there someway I can go back and burn the CDs now? I already looked through all the programs but didn't see anything.

If I can't, is there a recovery partition I can use to reinstall Windows? The only CD my friend has is a "Vista Easy Upgrade" disc.

Thanks.

 

The HP restore disc creator (or whatever it's called these days) doesn't delete itself, you'd have to go and remove it. Dig around in the C:\swsetup folder.

Or find a friend with an HP/Compaq and borrow their XP/Vista disc.

 

Only the XP OS version laptops has a recovery disk burn option. You'll find that on the main menu.. create recovery disc. There's also a partition for recovering.. press f11 on bootup.

For Vista laptops there's no option to burn recovery discs. It also has a recovery partition.. again press f11

The upgrade disc is if you want to upgrade Vista to a higher one say from Home Basic to Premium and up. You will have to pay for the upgrade though. I upgraded the Home Premium that came with my tx1000 to a full version Ultimate which I already bought and it took a while to upgrade.

 

There is an option to create the recovery discs on a Vista unit, as I made mine without problem (took forever though).

You can also use the upgrade disc to install a clean version of Vista using Orev's guide http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228

His method was painless and worked like a charm.

 

Funny, I didn't have a Vista recovery burning option on a tx1000 guess I have to rely on the recovery partition if something goes wrong. The only disc that was included was a Vista upgrade disc. I have a dv2000z but that one came with XP but ordered a recovery disc from HP with Media Center Edition.

 

Hmm. The tx1000 is the ultra-portable, right? Perhaps it uses a different version of the ThinkSoft Recovery utility.

 

wait wha? u sure? i bought one of my compaq notebooks with vista, and it came with the vista upgrade disc, but also to create restore discs.
i think you have to type "restoration software" or restore something, forgot but it let me create discs, 2 dvd-rs. but my other compaq (v3000z) came with xp and i have 2 sets of recovery discs. one for me when i go and travel or go places, and one for home, so just in case one gets lost i have the other. but i also have vista dual booted with it. now in vista i cant create restore discs because there is nothing to restore. it was an "express upgrade disc" it came with the vista disc and the drivers disc.

 

If you wipe out the HP install of Vista with a clean install from an official MS disc, you no longer have any HP Recovery to restore from on the hard drive. The recovery discs themselves will work, provided that you bought/created some before wiping out the factory install.

 

well isint it legal to use any windows xp cd as long as you have the correct version with the key you have?
he could just make an xp cd using nLite.

 

Correct, you can use any XP cd as long as it is the same version as your key. After all, it is the key you are really paying for (the disc itself is worthless).

 

yup. but is editing a windows disc legal too? which is basically what nLite is, even if you have a legal key?

 

Well I don't know about the legalities of that, but I guess Microsoft could have shut down nLite long ago if they wanted to. If anything, I think it helps promote their products........

 

good point, unless they dont really know them or dont care because vista is coming out, and nLite is only for xp

 

There's nothing wrong with using nLite or similar tools. MS specifically allows this so people can customize installs, they even have their own tool you can use for this. It's the type of thing HP does when they set up your system, and is also used by many companies to create custom install images for internal use.

There;s also vLite for vista