Hello, I just want to go over my contingency plan. I'm currently on a Toshiba Qosmio X505 Q870 and apparently they are no longer calling it a recovery disc creator, but a recovery media creator(this throws me off). I don't like subtle changes in the technical terms for things, because it only causes confusion and makes you wonder if it's actually what it once was called or something different(isn't it?). Most new computer(or all of them?MAJORITY) no longer come with recovery discs, and instead a hidden partition CONTAINING the necessary data is pre-installed. This is a lot of data, I guess not for now a-days with systems that can access 16 exa bytes and tera byte hard-drives being common I just didn't think I was gonna NEED DVDs let alone(if I don't want 4 or 5 DVDs) DL DVDs. I'm pretty young, but I remember having a computer with CD recovery disks lol.

Anyways, we all know if the entire drive is KILLED that partition isn't ''magically saved'' from the in-humanity of such a thing to happen. And this seems to be the best measure is to have a set of recovery discs just in-case you need to replace a hard-drive.

I am a bit confused on what happens to the OS and how the recovery works in general. If your hard-drive is corrupted or fried, all-data and obviously your OS is toast. I would think you wouldn't be able to re-install Windows from a set of recovery discs because couldn't you then be able to install windows on any computer? See this is why it says beginner on my info. In my opinion everyone should use disc imaging software. There are a number of good, free options
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=0h&oq=free+disc&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS304US305&q=free+disc+imaging+software