[FryingPan101]

Thanks for the post. We bought an HP last month with no recovery disk and we were really uncomfortable. I'm going to try to get one from them.

[Publius6961]

We bought an HP last month with no recovery disk and we were really uncomfortable. I'm going to try to get one from them.

Pssst.
A recovery disk may not be enough.
You bought and paid for an operating system and should be able to do a clean re-install.
Even if you have to call Big Brother Microsoft (which you would have to do) and ask "pretty please may I make my computer useful again?"
A "recovery" disk would not make a re-install possible.

[TN Republican]

Can't you go to that partition of your drive and copy all the directories and files to a removable storage medium?
Assuming you don't have any hard drive problems now, that seems like the prudent thing to do.