Strange ThinkVantage recovery experience.

[Turbo Audi]

Yesterday I created restore discs for the first time ever. To make a long story short, during the process, there was a red 'x' next to "operating system." That's as best I can remember. Finally I got to my Vista desktop. Turns out it worked. Did it reinstall my OS, or did it repair it, effectively bringing it back to default? While I was creating the discs I never got a message that the operating system was being created.

I went to:

Start/ThinkVantage/Create Recovery Media

and

Start/ThinkVantage/Create Product Recovery Media

Should I have done both of these? What about Rescue and Recovery?

The reason I did this is I often reinstall my OS on my computers to keep them fast and clean.

[Ideasmiths]

Yesterday I created restore discs for the first time ever. To make a long story short, during the process, there was a red 'x' next to "operating system." That's as best I can remember. Finally I got to my Vista desktop. Turns out it worked. Did it reinstall my OS, or did it repair it, effectively bringing it back to default? While I was creating the discs I never got a message that the operating system was being created.

I went to:

Start/ThinkVantage/Create Recovery Media

and

Start/ThinkVantage/Create Product Recovery Media

Should I have done both of these? What about Rescue and Recovery?

The reason I did this is I often reinstall my OS on my computers to keep them fast and clean.

I have given up on Rescue and Recovery many years ago, the time it takes to restore a 'latest' image would be quite similar to re-installing a clean recovery, then reinstall all programs/drivers. Of course if you don't do clean install every few months like you and I do, then it would be 'better' to use rescue and recovery. But for my case, I uninstalled RnR as well as window recovery.

The lenovo recovery disc for vista is 3 disc, it contains the OEM vista OS hence it doesn't ask you for a system OS (ie the red mark you mentioned). I burn a copy, then also create ISO of the 3 disc and store into another harddrive. Hence I got two backups in case the DVD got damage.

And you can also burn a CD/DVD/USB/Harddisk with the recovery media which is different from the recovery discs above. This is to allow you to boot into window at least, if you installed some freaking drivers or damage the window boot, so at least you can try to rescue the window, or rescue some important files away. I DON'T use this method because here is what I normally do.

1) I burn the 3 recovery discs as discribed.
2) I download Acronis Home for the 15 days trial and CLONE my pure lenovo hardisk to an external harddisk. This is my THIRD backup
3) I signup skydrive, Adrive, mozy or whatever free online storage I can find...skydrive is my current favourite with 25GB free disk. Then I download FREE to use gladinet which allows me to use the skydrive just like any network harddisk. THEN i backup all my important files automatically each day from lenovo HD to skydrive.

So for clean recovery, system crash (which never happened over 40 years i use computer), I just reinstall everything. This works better than using RnR because every few months, drivers/programs are all updated so I might as well install new ones instead of using my RnR then update it.

Hope that make sense

[Turbo Audi]

Thanks for the reply, yes it did answer my question.