Accessing WinRE

[PeterS]

I have Vista pre-installed on a brand new laptop - no recovery disk supplied. But apparently there's a recovery partition (which I can see if I view the disk via Disk management).
If you hit F8 during boot-up you get, in addition to the usual forms of SafeMode start-up, an option to go to what I take to be the Recovery Environment, also known as WinRE.
You select that option - you are asked to identify which national keyboard you are using (bizarrely the list isn't in alpha order, but let's leave this to one side). You then get a low-def GUI starting up and you are offered to sign in as Administrator. No password - no go.
Now when I set up Vista for my personal use I provided some passwords, none of which seem to work in the WinRE environment. I also tried "novatech" as a guess.
So: how does one get into WinRE?

By the way: my Vista set-up is fine at the moment, but I am one of those people who want to know their recovery options before disaster strikes.

[Taxation]

have you tried the password "password" :wink:

[PeterS]

I can now answer my own question:

When you hit F8 during boot-up and select the Recovery Environment, after then saying what national keyboard you are using, you are presented with a sign-on box. In fact I now see there is a drop-down menu which lists the accounts that you have set up on your machine.

The first is Administrator - and the reason I couldn't sign in is because I hadn't enabled that account properly with a password and you can't just click through on a blank.

But I could also see my normal username - and that accepted the associated regular password.

I could then see the Recovery Environment - and also an option to restore to initial Novatech settings.

So: that's good news. Maybe Novatech could have included a small sheet of paper somewhere to tell me - and do that for new customers.

And I'd still really prefer a proper system recovery disk (yes I have read the other threads) - because if the hard-disk fails in the first few bytes, F8 will never get you to the first menu.

[Coops]

Point taken about the sheet of paper explaining the WinRE Environment.

We are currently working on Vista Recovery DVD which will be avaliable in the future. Currently we are working to end of Q2 2007 release however this date is not fixed.