granms, it took me quite a while to study/read through your posts. I see what you mean and I do know that there is a difference between trying to do a recovery and doing a restore. I am trying to protect myself in case the same thing happens to me as happened to you and when zep mentioned the "Vista installation disk"......well tlhat sounded like something I needed to have. I DO have the Factory recovery disk. I asked for them when I bought my computer from HP, and they were sent with the computer. I also made recovery disk myself, so I have two sets of recovery. Thanks for taking the time and effort in giving so much detail and info in your posting, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has studied it and gotten good information from it.

Sorry for not looking first, I find on the "web". Keep your sensitive personal files secure with SanDisk SecureAccess software. I will read there how to use it, but still wounder about the need for 16 GB by the recovery creation program.

Your Toshiba should have come with recovery Cd's or DVDs and will allow you to reinstall the system very easy back to just like factory new should something go drastically wrong. Plus you should be able to load individual componente too - when you start it you will have some options on what do you want to do. My Toshiba with Vista has the Recovery Environment and all needed windows files/drivers on a hidden drive partition and amazingly when you really screw up something to a non start-able state the Toshiba will automatically fix the boot/startup process without you needing to do a thing, for many if not 'almost' all startup problems. Plus on F8 window you should see 'Repair my PC' which runs the automatic startup fixit which checks things and fixes. Of course if you lose hard drive access and then it would be nice to have that bootable CD ravencraven linked to burn the recovery environment to CD/DVD so you can hopefully fix things, should you delete your boot-loader or something that makes the hdd lost.

I recently lost the hard drive on my computer. I had made recovery disks when I first bought the computer and had made backups of all my documents, pictures, music etc. shortly before this happened. If I had had Acronis or some other system that clones the entire drive, I would have had a much easier time. As it was, once I removed the dead drive and installed a new one, I used the recovery disks to reinstall the operating system back to 2002. That meant I had many updates to do over. Fortunately, I had a SP2 disk from MS, so I used that and then over a period of about a week I installed all the more recent updates. Yes, I had to reinstall all my programs, that can't be avoided, but it was not an impossible task. I now have Acronis True Image and have a complete backup on an external hard drive, so if catastrophe strikes again, the job will be much less painful. If Carbonite does include the operating system, your job should not be difficult at all. Get a new hard drive, install it, and go to work. Good luck!