Recovery disc question

My system froze up a couple of nights ago and I had to power-cycle it, after which Lenovo's software tried to restore instead of booting into Vista. Things haven't been the same since and System Restore is not functioning normally.

I know that I have to create Recovery discs to attempt the restore. Now should I have gone through the process of creating Recovery discs immediately upon receipt? If I create them now, will they reflect the non-factory settings since I started installing stuff? (ie more like a backup) Or will the recovery discs always be based on factory settings?

Thanks!

 

Making the recovery discs shortly after reeving your machine is highly recommended. They will restore it to the factory state.

 

If I made my recovery discs later with some software installed already, would I run into trouble if I ever need to use them again?

Thanks in advance.

 

I "think" the Recovery Disks are made from the image on the recovery partition. So, you'll probably be OK. When you made the disks, did you still have the recovery partition available? Also, if you didn't delete the recovery partition, you could press that blue "Think Vantage" button to start the recovery from the partition itself.

 

I never touched the recovery partition or did anything with it. I hope you are right.

 

When I press the ThinkVantage button, the recovery option looks for a backup on the hard drive and doesn't seem to see the recovery partition. Thinkwiki indicates that I should click it during boot, so I'll try that.

I do wonder if it'll happen again though - is it Vista? I never had a lockup like that in XP.