Trouble making a restore disk

[VintagePunk]

My daughter has had a Toshiba Satellite A200 laptop since Sept. She got one from the store, made a recovery disk immediately, then a few days later we thought we found a hardware quirk (but later found we were wrong) so we returned it to get another one. She hadn't attempted to make a recovery disk on this second computer till now.

When she tries now using the Toshiba recovery disk creator, she gets an error saying "no HDD recovery area! The Toshiba Recovery Disk Creator cannot be launched." We can't find any information online about this error.

1) Does anyone know why this would be happening, and how to correct it?

2) Would the original recovery disk made for the first Toshiba work for this one? It's the exact same model, but the two potential problems I can see is that it's a different copy of Vista with a different key, and that on this second computer, she's partitioned the hard drive, whereas the first computer on which she made the disk hadn't been partitioned.

Thanks for any info anyone might have.

 

[Liesje]

I do not know very much about disk partitioning, but that could be the cause of the problem. Most laptops these days have restore partitions where the restore information is stored. Maybe the computer is confused by additional partitions?

 

[Reggie Thee Dog]

It sounds like the new HD doesn't have a recovery partition. You can restart and at boot up hit the F2 button (or whichever button you're supposed to push during boot up) to go into the system configuration and verify there is a recovery partition.

Most likely there is not one on this new HD...