Thank you very much for the instant reply! Yes, I re-read those steps, and discovered that I am very familiar with them: just yesterday I made a repair disc for another W 7 laptop (so that I could use a system image to swap hard drives).
Unfortunately, in this laptop, under "Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Backup and Restore"
- the "Create a System Repair Disc" subwindow opens,
- but immediately on top of it, the failure window appears and covers the subwindow (one an see over the edges of the failure window, that the drive selection subwindow text is still greyed out). Of course, the dominant window is the failure window, I can't get back to the "Create a System Repair Disc" subwindow.
= I can't select any drive, DVD or USB, to use as a repair disc
(I did the DVD drive test just because it was recommended in forums, not because I thought it had relevance.)
I may have overlooked completely something simple (as in my July post). But this seems to be a major W 7 applet failing as it should not.