How come the only way to do a recovery from a Complete PC Backup in Vista requires bootup from the orginal Vista DVD?

Ive payed hard cash for the original. Id like to know its good and safe, but when I have to use it everytime i need a Recovery! I acctually have to bring the original disc with me on my weekly travels.

Cant I get a Vista boot disc or such, that has Complete PC Backup and Recovery-thing build in or something? Hell aint Vista new and all, should I be bale to do it from a usb stick ;)

Im frustrated

Yeah, I definitely know what you mean. It can be REALLY frustrating. A lot of manufacturers are different in the way they sell their pc products. Some laptops come with built in recovery. My HP Pavilion DV9000 has a built in recovery - I never recieved a vista installation or backup CD.

It really depends on the manufacturer, but you may be able to go into your Computer section from the start menu, and it will list the drives. It's so hard to tell where EXACTLY it could be, but they should give you an option somewhere to burn a one time backup CD.

Aside from that - if you want to burn a backup cd, and aren't happy with carrying the original - what's the issue? Same data - same size, etc. Or just don't want to lose or damage the original backup cd just incase? Just curious.

Good luck though

hi all,,, i dont understand what you mean by built in recovery,,, most pc's with vista preinslalled & no recovery disc you make your owne when you first switch your pc on then keep it safe,,, you can only do this once, if you did not do it when first prompted you should still be able to do it but like i say just the once. If your recovery is stored on your hard drive only, then in the event of a compleat HDD failuar then you loose everything on it including the recovery backup. Alot of people including myself have a partition on there HDD with a back up recovery on it incase your os gets corroupt & you want to reinstall,,,, but like i say if your hard drive goes compleatly then this is also lost & then you need a recovery disc.

Some Gateway's used to come with a partial recovery partition - and it required the installation CD to complete the task (this was with XP and would use the i386 directory from the CD for the restore). Haven't done a Gateway restore recently so I don't know if this is the case here.

With Gateway/Emachines the restore partition is complete with the Vista computers and later XP models ever since 2005

I could be way off base, but I can't help wondering if there isn't a more basic issue with your computer that you seem to have to do such frequent recoveries?