Fortunately, vendors appear to be moving away from these data-wiping recovery discs. I recently looked at new PCs from ABS, Dell, Gateway, Lenovo, and WinBook, all of which came with either a real Windows XP CD or another way to perform nondestructive OS reinstalls.
If your PC lacks a Windows CD, a folder named 'i386' containing the Windows installation files is probably in the root directory of drive C: or in your C:\Windows folder. Your system may have several i386 folders, but the one you want has a lot of files with extensions ending in underscores (_), along with the executable files expand.exe, regedit.exe, and winnt32.exe. Copy this folder onto a CD for safekeeping, though you'll use the version on the hard drive to actually reinstall Windows.
Keep your 25-character Windows Product Key handy--you'll need it to reinstall the OS. The number is on the back of your PC, on the bottom of your notebook, or in some other hard-to-read spot; it may be listed in the documentation as well.
You'll also need a bootable CD for starting the install process. Bart Lagerweij's free PE Builder creates a CD-bootable version of XP called Bart's Pre-install Environment, or BartPE, from either a Windows CD or the i386 folder. Click here to download PE Builder.
Open PE Builder's main dialog box and select the folder or drive containing your i386 folder, but not the folder itself. CheckCreate ISO image, clickBurn to CD, and select your CD-RW drive from the Device drop-down menu. If PE Builder doesn't support your burner, double-click the PE Builder--created .iso file to launch your CD authoring program and burn the CD
Purchase of Symantec Ghost is another option
