Ok, here goes ...

I've got a Tosh Satellite L670 with all the toshiba trimmings, including recovery centre and the hidden recovey drive/image. All good so far. Until the I had a disk crash So, no toshiba recovery centre, and no factory image. And, being a software developer (not a hardware tech), I didn't create a set of recovery DVD's.

Foolishly, I didn't get around to it, so my bad.

I managed to get a bootable Windows7 disk, and got a DOS prompt, and managed to reformat the main disk and boot sector. Then I got an image of another, very similar, Toshiba, loaded that image, re-registered windows 7 and got the old girl back up and running. Obviously, I'm still having problems as the images are a bit incompatible, but I've got a working system, so I can go online and do normal stuff, but I wanted to reset the whole thing back to its factory settings. I got the reset discs for my make/model sent to me by toshiba (for a price, of course).

The instructions to use the factory reset discs are very simple. Put the disc in the dvd drive, shut down the laptop, restart it, press F12, and choose 'Boot from DVD'.

Did that ... Didn't work The message I get is that the DVD boot failed.

My problem now is that I (allegedly) have 2 factory reset discs supplied by Toshiba, and no way to use them. I've done a little research, and the files on the discs (SWM files) appear to be split windows image files (WIM files), so I downloaded the Windows System Image Manager to see if I could use that to reload the factory image. It didn't recognize them as image files.

I am led to believe that a dos utility (IMAGEX.exe) might do the trick, but I'm not confident (Don't know what switches to use, don't know how to re-constitute 'split' image files, not convinced that I can run it while Windows7 is running on the disc I want to reload the image to, etc.)

So, any help or guidance would be appreciated, especially from Toshiba (if they can tell me why the 'instructions' don't work).

Thanks