Sounds like the repair place you took it to removed the repair partition. not to confuse you but this means that you no longer have the restore partition on your hard drive. i had the similar problem on purpose. i freed up the extra space on my hard drive after upgrading to windows 7. thus i got Acronis home and made a backup and enabled the boot option with that program which brings up a message at boot/startup giving me the option to restore my computer.....for more information on how to do this you can buy the program and call them after your purchase and ask them to guide you through the process. the website is http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/index.html