I have the recovery partition but no disks, doing this for a friend, pain in the $@#&*&, gimme a home brew computer any day, is there any way to create these disks from the partition without the software ?
If you are on Windows 8/8.1 you can use the control panel > recovery > create recovery drive and select to use the recovery partition. You can make it onto a usb stick if you like for easier handling.
why not boot to the recovery partition and reinstall right from that? no need to make a disk at all.
You may have to go thru the Troubleshooting or Diagnostic boot to get to the restore options though. It would help if we knew the make and model# of your laptop if you cant find it.