Q: I have an external hard drive and one internal hard drive in my laptop. Toshiba only gave me recovery disks if I ever needed to restore my computer (so I do not have another built in drive with a back up restore system) and when I use my Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier to defrag my disks it shows a "Toshiba System Volume" along with the rest of my main drives. It says it's capacity is around 1.5 gigabytes and its almost full. I was just wondering what it could be?
A: Many Windows computers nowadays come with a partition (often hidden) which contains system recovery information. Depending on the make/model, you may be able to press a key (such as F2 or F11) during POST to boot from that partition. This allows you to to a recovery install of Windows without additional media. However, it doesn't help recover a system if the HD itself dies.