HP Recovery Disc Questions

OK, I went ahead and started the Recovery Disc Creator from my Vista partition. (Before reading further you should know that my Vista partition has been resized to about 40GB and I already have a full backup image of the entire partition) When I launched the creator it automatically started "creating files". It basically filled up my entire partition until there was 5GB left, and then it seemed to overwrite my Recovery partition as the partition went from 1.85GB free to the full 12GB free and then continued to fill up again.

1. I'm wondering if there is any point in retaining my recovery partition now that I have the recovery disks and since it seems that it was overwritten with new files.

2. Did the recovery creator create disks that will recover my system to the original factory defaults, or did it just backup the current data on the drive? (seeing as how it said "creating files" rather than just burning from files already created)

3. My laptop came with dual drives. One with my Vista partition and the recovery partition and the other empty. I now have a Vista partition, Recovery partition, and an XP partition on my primary and a bunch of data on my second drive (XP is hidden from Vista/Recovery and vice versa via boot managing software). If I run the recovery discs, is there any chance that I can get it to just recover the Vista partition to factory or will I simply lose everything on both drives? If so, the discs are worthless to me.

Sorry for the uber-long post. Please help. Much appreciated. Thanks.

-Ryan

 

1) Once you create the recovery disks, the parition is useless. You may reformat it and extend if you like

2)The recovery disks will restore it the way it was when you first got it out of the box. It wont include any programs or settings youve installed

3) Question too long to read. I gotta go home, just finished work! haha

 

LOL...thanks. What I'd like to know is whether it will reformat BOTH drives though (since the secondary was empty when I got it). Cuz my backups of the Vista and XP partition are stored on my secondary drive. From what you've said, that seems to be the case. But I just want to clarify.

Hopefully you can read this tomorrow

Any other replies are still appreciated as well, I want to be absolutely sure that the process created "factory defaults" recovery discs since it said it was "creating" files which I didn't think was necessary if the files were already on the recovery partition. (I know I'm a rambler...)

 

HP has a kind of strange recovery setting. If you made a Recovery Install Disc it will restore all the original programs (and bloatwares) and delete the previous OS. If you re-install from a Recovery Partition it will restore the drive to it's original setting but will leave the program you've installed on there but it renders it useless because the Windows directory is freshly recovered but the associated files to run a program are deleted! In the end I just re-install by using the discs instead of the recovery partition. I have a dv2138xx

 

Yah, I get that I will definitely lose everything on the primary drive if restoring from the disks, but I'm trying to figure out if I will lose my data on the secondary drive as well. If it restores exactly to original condition, then that should be the case, but I want to make sure.

My other question is just making sure that the process I saw when making the disks is what was supposed to happen and that the disks will actually do what they're supposed to and not recover back to the point it was at when making the disks.

 

Take out your secondary drive, this way its impossible for it to be formated. It should only restore the OS partition

Recovery disks wont recovery any of your stuff, its all HP programs and bloatware. end of story

 

Thanks...this is what I wanted to know. And that's a good idea. I didn't think of removing the secondary drive. Thanks again.