Vista Backup/Restore Question

I have Vista Home Premium x64 here. The PC came with the main OS partition and also a 2nd partition with the factory restore image on it, shows up as D: on same drive, etc.

I am trying to use the built-in Vista backup and restore center to backup my files to another drive. I notice it offers to backup the factory restore partition as well.

Question: If I do backup this factory restore partition/files to another HD, and then my Vista OS is somehow nuked beyond repair, how do I or can I access this backed up factory restore image and run it to restore my Vista onto a new drive and so on?

In other words, if Win is gone, how do I run any backup/restore app to recover? I do also have the Vista CD that came with the system.

I know this is probably pretty basic stuff, but I have never tried using MS backup/restore for any real recovery, I have always used images done with Clonezilla and so on. I'm wondering if I can just use what comes with Vista to get the same job accomplished.

Any Vista people who are familiar with this? Thanks.....

 

I may be wrong but just a back up to a external drive of the partion using windows back up will not work unless its a bootable recovery and as far as I know windows premium has No entire pc back up only ultimate edition does.Example my HP came with a backup partition and No recovery CD but it came with a recovery manager tool that allowed me to make a one time set of bootable recovery set of cds that boot and format the drive and replace the partion back to factory.However if you leave the partion and do not delete it you can boot from the partion.After I made my recovery CD I made sure they work and then deleted my partion a located all the space back to my C Drive.Then I made a bootable disk with paragon and backed up entire pc to external Drive So I can recover From the archive and minus the factory crap and partion if that fails I still have recovery CDs.


ps sorry I skipped around a bit,or if mislead on any wrong info.its late and one two many beers my keyboard is spinning the room.

 

Thanks djohn, that's helpful info... On first startup, it did tell me to make that recovery disk, which I did. But I thought it only contained drivers backed up from my system or something. If it boots and then starts the restore from the factory image partition, then that might help.

I'm starting to think it's best if I just use Clonezilla as usual and take a full HD image of both OS and factory restore partitions. Then I can always restore that and redo from scratch.

Then I will just use the Vista backup for data files that change and then I can restore those after I recover and have the new OS up and running again.