HELP! System Restore gone after Vista Upgrade.

[w0okie]

I tried all the other follow-up suggestions and unfortunately, none of them worked. However, I bought a external CD/DVD drive and I was able to use the Recovery Discs to go back to Factory settings.

I did talk to HP Support and they suggested that the driver was corrupt from upgrading the Vista from Home Premium to Ultimate. 

Using the external CD/DVD drive solved all the problems that I was having. Recovery Partition is back to normal, my original internal CD/DVD drive is back to normal and I am back to original settings. I think it is a good advice that I should probably have a second hard-drive for the Vista Ultimate OS. I will do that when I need the Ultimate again. 

I've learnt that even if you upgrade Vista from Vista, you still lose your recover partition and some of your drivers will become corrupt. I thought this was only the case when you are upgrading from XP to Vista or downgrading to XP from Vista, but this was not the case.

Anyway, I am leaving a kudos to every single person who replied to this thread, because I would've been really lost without your responses. I really appreciate your help! and Erico, your suggestion worked and is the solution. Thank you so much! I'm so happy I have my computer back.

[maximouse]

My issue is less severe -- but related, I think. Following a OS autoupgrade (from MS download), several of my USB serial device drivers went "missing", including those for my CD/DVD drive. I was finally able to instruct the system to search for them, but had to reduce the search string back to C:\Windows in order for the system to 'find' them. The problem appears to be solved for now.

The first thing I tried, of course, was a "System Restore" -- only to discover that something had turned Sys Restore off on my HP Desktop Vista x32 machine. I KNOW I had that feature 'on' and checked for the C drive. I think I've turned it back on. What worries me is how it got turned off in the first place.

Sign me "Bugged by ghosts"