HP Factory Image

[Chisholm]

I'm new to Vista & also HP computers. I've always had a complete copy of the operating system (XP, 98, 95...), never a factory image with restore disks.

Must the Factory Image be Drive D, ie, does the restore process expect to find the image there or is any other drive letter acceptable? I made the restore disks before changing the drive letter. Perhaps that should answer my question, but I'd like opinions, please.

Chisholm wrote:
> I'm new to Vista & also HP computers. I've always had a complete copy of
> the operating system (XP, 98, 95...), never a factory image with restore
> disks.
>
> Must the Factory Image be Drive D, ie, does the restore process expect
> to find the image there or is any other drive letter acceptable? I made
> the restore disks before changing the drive letter. Perhaps that should
> answer my question, but I'd like opinions, please.

The drive image does have to be Drive D:. You have two ways to access
the recovery partition, either directly by booting from it or through
the recovery utility in your Vista programs menu. Both the boot manager
and recovery software shortcut expect the recovery image to be on D:
drive. Other than esthetics, why bother to change it anyway?

Since you have recovery discs it may not matter what you do to the
recovery partition but I'd want to be sure that the discs will work
before changing anything that can't be undone. If you ever have to use
the discs to do a full destructive recovery, or install the OS on a new
harddrive, the recovery discs will recreate the D: partition.