Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 - new recovery discs?

Question

I have got Windows Vista Home Premium on my Toshiba laptop, which I bought about a year ago. I then created 2 recovery discs using Toshiba Recovery Disc Creator.

One of my friends has got a Windows 7 DVD with multiuser license (or so) which I wish to try on my laptop. Now my questions are:

If I install Windows 7 (by upgrading), will it allow me to create new recovery discs? which I'll be able to use in case anything goes wrong with the Windows.

If I won't be able to create recovery disc, then if in case my Windows 7 gets corrupted will I be able to switch-back/down-grade to Vista using Toshiba recovery discs?

I am not very sure how does a recovery disc work.

Answer 1

HowToGeek posted a tutotial on how to create a Windows 7 recovery disk here. This will not be the same as the official Toshiba discs but will be a step in the right direction.

You can also consider phoning Toshiba and confirming with them if they will send you new recovery discs if you provide proof of purchase for Windows 7 and it is supported on your particular model. Alternatively check with them if there is a Windows 7 compliant Recovery Disc Creator available, chances are you should be able to download it from their support site.

Answer 2

Short answer - if you upgrade, you probably won't be able to create recovery disks using this tool for Win 7. If your system goes belly up, you will be able to use the recovery disks you already created, but it will restore you to Vista. You will then need to upgrade again.

The tool is usually designed to make a bootable image of the existing state of the hard drive, but I would tend to guess that it is locked to the specific OS. HP for example, allows only a single creation and then the tool disables itself.

By the way, if you are only trying, DO NOT activate the Win 7. You can test for 30 days before it will hound you to activate, then you can reset it for another 30 days. You can do this up to 120 days. If you decide to stay with it, you can activate, but don't until you are sure you want to lock your license.

Answer 3

I recently did some work on a 2002 HP Pavilion, which also had a tool to create recovery disks, and it apparently also worked once only. However, system recovery was done from a hidden partition, and this was probably the source for the recovery disks - not the current state of the operating system. System recovery was painful because it installed XP RTM (ie. no service pack) which then had to be patched.

Answer 4

The HP recovery disks will restore your system to the O/S contained in the restore partition, meaning back to Vista.

Upgrading to Win7 will not affect the system image in the restore partition, so after the upgrade the old HP restore CD is totally useless should you decide to stay with Win7. It's only useful should you want to go back to Vista (and lose all your data).

Conclusion: After a definitive upgrade to Win7, you should depend on the Win7-generated restore CD, rather than the HP CD. You may even delete and reuse the now useless HP restore partition.