amdphr3@kXP

Ive got to disagree on this one. Ive got an old hp slate 2 tablet laying around that came loaded with win 7 pro...which honestly i have hardly bothered using as it was simply a dog of a thing to use. So slow to the point where it was good for almost nothing but a doorstop or paperweight. Ive since installed win 10 preview 10049 and what a difference in performance. Its actually improved greatly to the point where im finding i actually want to keep it on the coffee table and use it. Surprised me as past experience installing a newer os on old hardware has been that it runs alot slower. Functionality is streets ahead now too...though i guess it makes a difference when the os is designed to run on a tab. Haven't installed it on anything else yet though so time will tell. Could just be drivers are much better implemented for the hardware? Who knows

Thanks for your help submix8c and myselfidem. Turns out after a second look, that it looks much the same as you described submix8c, the BIOS must be able set the restore partition as active and boot PE from that (My initial thought was that this was handled by the bootloader on the primary partition instead), so providing I dont do anything to trash the restore partition, all should be good.

If for arguments sake I installed something else on it, say linux, or a virus/worm/trojan managed to destroy the bootsector/bootloader then I would think that it would remove the F9 option, as it would replace the bootloader that contains the restore option. I guess the question I am asking, is how do you restore manually the WIM files I.E Is there a tool similar to ghost that I can use to restore these successfully in the event something should go wrong?

I have an Eeepc 1005P that come preinstalled with win 7 starter, which I bought for my studies as it was cheap and surprisingly does everything i need it to, including CAD (I was shocked at that part). Anyway, I have managed to lose my restore DVD, and dont have a spare copy of win 7 that hasn't been activated on any other machine laying around otherwise I would take this option, so I figured that I would see what is on the recovery partition, I was hoping that it would be a ghost image, as it would make it easy for me to do a restore from these. Anyway this is how far I have gotten with this so far: I already have a bootable usb key (I just used hirens as I was too lazy to do it myself, and this has alot of useful diagnostic tools on it anyway) I have managed to unhide the restore partition, and locate the restore images. These are in WIM format. How do I go about restoring these, and has anyone done this manually without the factory DVD without any issues?