lost bewildered and confused about Product Recovery

[philwolsey]

I'm trying to understand if my Product Recovery disks contain the Operating System (Vista Business) for my X61 tablet.
1. My business partner suffered a HD failure and had to restore his new HD from the Product Recovery disks that we all made when we received our identical machines (Start, ThinkVantage, Create Recovery Media, Create a set of product recovery disks now). When the time came, he discovered there was no operating system in the 8 CDs he made (and his set appear to be identical to the set I made from my own machine).
2. I can't find any account of the recovery process that states categorically that the operating system forms a part of the set you make manually (he has had to send for the Operating System media from IBM/Lenovo). I've seen on this web site that if you rebuild from the hidden partition it will restore the operating system. I've also seen that if you ask IBM/Lenovo, they will send a boot disk, operating system disk and Applications disk.
3. What I've very keen to establish is whether I have all that I need when my machine inevitably goes wrong. I don't want to test my discs on my functioning machine in case I miss the point of no return and trash my laptop.

Does anyone know if 'product recovery discs enable you to restore you computer to its factory installed state' is simply misleading and you need an operating system disk supplied by IBM/Lenovo or whether it contains the full thing in the set of discs I produced for myself. If it does contain the full thing, given my set of discs is apparently identical to my business partner's set of discs, has anyone met this problem before, or even better knows the solution?

thanks

Phil

[sarbin]

welcome to the forum.

your product recovery set should restore your machine to its out-of-box state. if the x6x set is anything like my t43 set, you boot disk 1, which starts the restore process. make sure your machine's boot device order is set to use your optical drive first. once disk 1 is booted, just follow the on-screen directions to reimage the machine. again, if it's like my t43, the process will destroy all partitions on the target drive, recreate the restore partition, copy all the contents from all the disks to the restore partition and then recover the system from the restore partition. i've found it to be quite simple. i just sit back and watch it work. about 45-50 minutes after it starts, i've got a reimaged machine, ready for ms and lenovo updates. to be clear, the disk set is not anything like a retail windows install disk. the set works to reimage your machine to factory state.

hth.

[philwolsey]

to be clear, the disk set is not anything like a retail windows install disk. the set works to reimage your machine to factory state.

hth.

Thanks for your reply. Do you happen to know if the process is transparent enough for me to know that my version of the recovery disks (unlike my business partner's) contains the OS so that I can interrupt the process before I do something irrevocable and begin to trash a perfectly healthy system?

Phil