System Repair Disk not booting into repair options

Bob Vance said:

Im an idiot. My BIOS was not set to boot to CD first. Fixed!! But thanks for tips. I learned a lot tonight

Next problem. Tried making system recovery disks but it keeps conking out on second of three DVDs to write telling me I need higher quality disks. Frst disk was written. Maybe I will just buy them from HP

You can wait to order those recovery disks until you need to reinstall Vista, which you will never have to do if.....

After you get Win7 installed and running to your satisfaction, you'll never need to reinstall either OS again if you use the Win7 Backup Imaging utlity to make an image of your HDD which can easily be reimaged.

I make a primary formatted partition on each of my machines to store the image for easy detection if reimaging is needed, but it is best to store a copy externally in case of HDD failure. You just boot from the installer's Repair console, Recover Using Image and reimage your HDD or a replacement in 15 minutes.

Thanks for replies. I did make an image the moment the machine was registered. I always like to have all my options covered but I have always used images to restore my mistakes on XP and older OS'. Im a bit irked that I could not make the recovery disks myself but now understand I have about 4 other options outside of recovery disks. The system reapir disc and F8 on boot up both work

My next experiment will be seeing if I can use Seagate DiskWizard (free Seagate/Maxtor OEM version of Acronis True Image) to image machine. I like their .tib files better than the Windows imaging. Seagate support said it should work on Windows 7