so after reading this...I thought i'd post to let folks know what does work on some toshibas.(quite frankly I believe it would work on any system with a hidden recovery partition) ubcd is the erd with several useful utilities, unfortunately nickolasgoodman failed to mention which of those he used which brought him success. I have many usb disks with some 50+ bootable 'rescue' options, windows and linux installations, so on and so forth, as being geek and learning new stuff everyday is what i do. gparted live is the tool you want, you can get the live rescue disk from the folks at gparted
HERE and you can create a bootable live disk with it simply burning the downloaded image to a disk as an image, as that is what it is. boot from the media you created(i prefer creating bootable live usb sticks, more info at pendrivelinux.com - click YUMI - so much more efficient) and once gparted live starts up and the software opens, find the hddrecovery partition. for me it was the 3rd partition, the first was a very tiny 'diag' partition, second was the windows partition some numbskull loaded win7 ultimate 'pirated' edition on, the third was the hddrecovery, this one i right clicked, clicked manage flags, and unchecked hidden, and checked boot. initially the diag partition had boot and diag checked, afterwards it only had diag checked. I applied the settings and rebooted the laptop. direct to toshibas recovery lickety split no hitting 0, no bothering with anything else. do NOT bother debating any of the options, the one and only option you should use is the recovery out of box state. 15 minutes you'll be up and going again. I hope this was clear and concise enough to help others, this is something I have looked at more then once over the years, but only now did it work! :o
nickolasgoodman wrote: Hi, I have a Toshiba Satellite L505D running Vista that I wiped the C: on and was stuck without any recovery cd. Like a lot of systems these days this laptop 'does' have a recovery partition. The problem is it is hidden and not set to active. Luckily I have an 'Ultimate Boot' cd that allows you to look at and change the partitions so I set the recovery partition to active and un-hid it. When I rebooted the system it went straight to the recovery screen and let me reset it to 'out-of-box-state'. I hope this helps.