where can i find our buy a system recovery disc ? please be specific

System recovery discs are normally bundled with OEM machines, especially laptops. Contact your OEM for information on buying a replacement set of recovery discs. Otherwise, click Help & Support on your XP Start menu and do a search on "system recovery."

The People From Hp State There Is No Need For A Recovery Disk, All That Is Needed Is On D Drive. Which Is Nut's In My Book, What Happens If My Hard Drive Brakes Down?

In preparation for that DaveT, I suggest copying that folder to a CD or two or three.

I'm in the same boat with no recovery CD.. just bought a custom PC from HP. The problem is that the recovery system is Hewlett-Packard's version of system recovery. I tried running that hoping to do a bootfix.... and guess what happened???? It started copying all the files and then boom... system froze! It turns out that it was actually copying all those files to my Win98 drive... which was a completely separate disk (E:). It errored out because the hard drive ran out of space. That turned out to be a good thing because it prevented the full installation process from completing. I also discovered it wiped out (replaced) my win.ini and system.ini. I finally found instructions on the web on how to manually recover that last working Win98 registry. Now I'm back to square one... one working disk for Win98 and one with WinXP... and can't get them to both work in the dual boot menu. So, I say this to say... whatever you do, don't run that HP system recovery if you've added a second hard drive!

Hugh, How can I copy that folder to a CD when it has no drive letter associated with it? While in disk management tools on XP I discovered there were two partitions on the hard drive... drive a 55G NTSF partition and a 5G FAT32 partition.. except the FAT32 partition has no drive letter. I believe this must be where the system recovery is stored. Is there such thing as a hidden partition? If so, how would I go about unhiding it so I can copy to CD?

Normally OEM manufacturers put the Win files in a Cabs folder on drive C:. It's not the same as a recovery CD. A recovery CD restores the system and all the applications to the same state they were when you first got the system. The Cab files only refresh the Windows system files.