T61 - Empty Backup Partition?

I've had my T61 for about a week and I love it, and decided to get off my lazy butt and make some recovery disks so I don't break my precious.

Clicked start, searched for "Recovery Media." Nothing. Strange, I thought, but I figured I'll just get a Vista boot CD elsewhere.

Went to go look at my partitions using Vista's Disk Management. As expected, I had my C drive and an invisible 6.55gb recovery partition. However, the recovery partition had 6.55gb free space. 100% free.

Does that mean there's nothing on my recovery partition? The only other clue I have is that the partition has no file system type and is "EISA Configuration," which after googling, provided no leads into why it's empty or how to view files in it.

I want to keep my recovery partition, but it does me no good if it's empty. Is it really empty, or a misreporting on Vista's behalf? How can I view files than could potentially be in there (or, make sure that there are any files at all)?

Is this apparent emptiness the cause of my apparent lack of recovery media? (Speaking of the recovery media, is there anyway you can burn it to an .iso file instead? Since you can only burn it once, and my laptop has no DVD burner, I'd rather move an .iso onto my desktop and burn it onto a DVD. Plus, I'm a screwup, so I'd probably mess something up and need a backup of the backup.)

Thanks in advance. =]