I bought a new Vista laptop about two months ago. I tried to create a System Restore Disk, but the program encountered an error, crashed, and quit. I didn't think anything about it until today when I was given a free copy of XP professional. I want to dual boot Vista and XP on my machine, but in order to do that, you have to have the Vista install disk. The disk didn't come with my computer and I can't create the disk. I know in XP you could press the F8 or F10 key, and it would launch System Restore where you could do a destructive restore, but in my Vista BIOS screen, I can only press <<ESC>> to change the boot order or <<F10>> to change my BIOS settings. How can I go about doing a destructive, factory defaults, complete wiping of my computer from the recovery partition? Thanks in advance!!

This depends on the make of your computer and the status of your recovery partition. I presume that you've got an HP (from the "Esc" key for boot order) - and usually F11 will force a factory restore.

Normally tho', there's a prompt to press F11. If that is missing then there's usually some difficulty (I've had it with 2 HP's so far), but mashing F11 at various times during the boot sequence will usually bring up some repair/restore options.

Good luck!