Toshiba Recovery Partition & Hotkey + Instructions

I tried to boot wwith the F8. nothing happens

This worked on my Toshiba S1120. The options were mildly different, but the F8 trick worked. Once I got into the Advanced Boot menu and clicked on the Recover System link, I had a few options that weren't EXACTLY what is listed above, but basically, I just picked the ones that said "Restore computer to out-of-box-state". It wiped out everything and started me with a fresh machine as if I had just bought it. Worked like a charm.

If that doesn't work (the one I've got here just cycled back to the menu screen repeatedly when "repair my computer" was selected) and if you can still get into Windows at all you might be able to create a set of recovery DVD's and recover the system by booting to the first DVD (press f12 at boot up with the DVD in the drive) you get the same repair setup but no option to do anything other than totally wipe the system.

That's what I just did, I was about to give up, accept the recovery partition itself was damaged and start again with a clean install of Vista (as I have a Vista Anytime install disc) but I presume that it was just the boot record (BCD?) that was failing to allow the system to boot to the recovery menu.

The recovery DVD wiped the entire HD, removed all partitions, wrote a new recovery partition (which the system now will boot to) then restored Windows from that partiton, brill, saved me a load of time finding all the drivers etc.

Hi, I have a Toshiba Satellite L505D running Vista that I wiped the C: on and was stuck without any recovery cd. Like a lot of systems these days this laptop 'does' have a recovery partition. The problem is it is hidden and not set to active. Luckily I have an 'Ultimate Boot' cd that allows you to look at and change the partitions so I set the recovery partition to active and un-hid it. When I rebooted the system it went straight to the recovery screen and let me reset it to 'out-of-box-state'. I hope this helps.