T61 recovery discs/backup

Well uhh so I started burning out recovery media using thinkvantage rescue and recovery. I get the first CD burned it verifies and Im good on that one. But then I put a blank dvd+rw in for it to start burning the next disc and it sat at "preparing to record.." forever without any sort of disk activity. So me being impatient I didn't wait too long, maybe about 30-45min. I cancelled the burn and now I am screwed on recovery media until I reinstall because it thinks I burnt the discs out. My question is how long should it sit at "preparing to record..". My next question is... I want to get rid of the service partition on my harddrive (that was the whole point of trying to burn the discs) but anyways for backing it up... would my best bet be to use Acronis disk director to copy the partition to an external drive or use Acronis true image to make an image file of the partition and copy to an external drive.

 

Have you updated the Rescue & Recovery software in the past 2 weeks? Once installed, the s/w directs you to reburn the disks and toss the old ones. Might give you another chance to get them done.

 

The low-brow language required for me to describe my feelings for Lenovo's baffling choice not to offer a real install disk with their computers--would go against the grain with my long term presence on this message board. Lenovo does know my feelings on the matter.

 

Well I did receive an update for Rescue and Recovery when I ran it yesterday, but it did not direct me to burn new discs, nor is it allowing me to burn off another set. (still thinks I have copies)