Recovery disc

The terms Recovery disc (or Disk), Rescue Disk/Disc and Emergency Disk[1] all refer to a capability to boot from an external device, possibly a thumb drive, that includes a self-running operating system: the ability to be a boot disk/Disc that runs independent of an internal hard drive that may be failing, or for some other reason is not the operating system to be run.

[4] Many modern systems have eliminated use of a physical recovery disc and instead store this software in a separate partition on the hard disk itself.

[10] Most modern PCs store their recovery (non-destructive) or restore (destructive) tool on a hard drive partition rather than on bundled CD-ROMs or DVDs.

Some third-party software has the function to create a factory recovery partition and one key system backup and restore for Windows PC and Server.

In the case of free software, operating systems can legally be re-packaged and distributed, and thus there is no barrier to making the full installation available.

However, in the absence of a backup of system-specific configuration, which is provided on recovery discs, a re-installed operating system may require re-configuration.

Windows 8 includes two built-in recovery options, Refresh and Reset; Refresh re-installs Windows while preserving most user settings, while Reset performs a full restore back to its default configuration, similar to a factory restore function.