My mom desperately needed a new computer (she's still running XP on a very old Dell), so I decided to pick up one of HP's new TouchSmart 420t machines for her, thinking it'll also be a great machine for Windows 8 when it arrives.
HP, in their infinite wisdom, decided that, among other annoyances, one can only create a single set of recovery media from the included Recovery Media Creation application. Once you make the set, that's it. If you lose the media, or if you want to make a second set on USB instead of DVDs, you're out of luck, short of ordering the media from HP for a price.
If you are stuck in this situation, there is an easy fix, assuming you still have the Recovery partition available on the hard drive.
- Open up an Administrator command prompt window
- Change to the D drive (D:)
- Change directories to D:\HP\CDCreatorLog (cd \hp\CDCreatorLog)
- Delete the ResumeSnapshot.xml file (del ResumeSnapshot.xml)
- Restart the Recovery Media Creation application …