Gateway recovery partition Vista

[sailor-jo]

Hello, sufferers of Windows and other %^&*(

Though the question had been asked before in a similar way I want to bring the subject up again.

I bought a refurbished Gateway notebook which works quite OK though it runs hotter than I like. Now I try to make recovery discs but I cannot spot any command or suitable files. There is a recovery partition of 10.1 GB but my file manager tells me 10GB are available. So either there is a special mechanism for hiding data or there never was anything.

I can buy discs but I hate to pay if I do not need to. Like General Patton supposedly said: " I do not like to pay for real estate twice".

A similar problem occured on my HP laptop. There I see the files but I could not make them work because The CD Create program claimed that I did this procedure before and I am entitled to only one copy. I may have made that copy though I cannot remember (CRS desease). YOUTUBE has a nice procedure to eliminate the road block. I am just in the process of burning the 4 DVDs and hope they will work. It seems the companies suspect we are all criminals. No one ever asked me for a copy and I never offered one and I would not want to work with illegal software. I even rather pay than use free cloud computing.

If anyone has a hint I would gladly give it a try.

Thanks in advance

Sailor Jo

 

[r_manic]

Errrr, I don't understand, are you ranting about having to pay for certain things, or are you trying to find out how to reveal the hidden partition? For the latter try running a separate boot environment like a Linux Live CD or something similar.

 

[sailor-jo]

Errrr, I don't understand, are you ranting about having to pay for certain things, or are you trying to find out how to reveal the hidden partition? For the latter try running a separate boot environment like a Linux Live CD or something similar.

dear r-manic,

there is some ranting though my frustration may blur the real purpose: getting those discs made.

The situation now: I could not find any data in the recovery partition on my Gateway and I had to get the official CD. I surely did not use the smartest procedures but I am back in business.

More interesting is the situation on the HP laptop. I found a procedure on youtube that modifies the name of a file in the Windows directory. Once that was done I was able to burn the recovery DVDs.

Thanks for reading and responding.

sailor JO