When my old laptop cratered, I had to buy this one, and guess what OS it had on it! One of the first things I did was to burn two recovery disks. Since then, I've been unable to play a music CD or install any software from CDs. Every time I do, I get a message that says something like, "This part of the hard drive is reserved for Recovery, etc." How can I get past this? Until I do, my CD/DVD drive is worthless to me.

Help!

Tom

Use the virtual drive manager (right click 'computer' icon on desktop select 'manage' from the drop down menu, this puts you in the management console view, look down the list on the left and select 'disk management', wait a few seconds and a bar chart view of you drives (and partitions) will appear.

In the block labelled 'recovery' or whatever the recovery drive is right click inside the block, from the menu choose 'delete partition' you will be asked to confirm the action and you will see the block then changes to 'unassigned'. Now you can either extend the first drive with Vista on until it takes up all the disk or for efficiency I recommend right click in the 'unassigned' block and select 'create partition' ( yes I know we just got rid of it but that cleared the partition table and any 'clamp' the drive might have had on it to keep it a recovery drive, otherwise we could have just formatted it, this is best.) confirm the size as using the max available and keep the defaults for formatting, but do not select to 'quick format' type in a Volume label if you like and tick the box for assign a drive letter, click OK then let it do the job, it will take anything from a few mins to a lot depending on the size of the partition, when done it will display the block for that drive as 'healthy'.

Now back in explorer view you have a new drive with the name (whatever you put in for 'volume label') and can use it for anything you like.

Thank you so very, very much. I'm out of town this weekend, but will try this as soon as I get back to my hotel tomorrow night. I surely do hope this works. Even if it doesn't, though, I very much appreciate your taking the time to type your reply, and I want to thank you.

Tom

Tom