Lost operating system

If the recovery partition is still intact, you should be able to create ONE set of recovery media.

What brand of laptop/desktop is this? Most major manufacturers include a software package from within the start menu that allow you to do this.

I have HP Pavilion Laptop, it came with Windows XP media center edition. I did a clean install with windows 7 on drive c: but left the recovery partition intact. I found out later that some components don't work with windows 7. Is it possible to create a recovery disk from the recovery partition.

There is no way to create a set of recovery discs from the recovery partition itself. It is normally done through a particular program, in the case of HP it is usually Roxio or Cyberlink.

If you have reinstalled Windows 7 but left the recovery partition intact then it is likely that you won't be able to create a set of discs anyway because it has essentially rewritten the master boot record(mbr) which is used by the recovery partition to do its job.

Thanks for your help hedwar2011.