We got a new Acer laptop with Vista installed at work. As it's getting ready to go out in the field, we wanted to do a burn-in test on it. We made the recovery DVDs before we ran the test. Part of the burn-in was bonnie++, which does a destructive read/write test of the hard drive.

The machine passed with flying colors, but after trying to boot to the recovery DVD to being re-installing the system, the machine began to try PXE boot after a while. After doing some googling, it appears these 'recovery' disks expect a certain recovery partition to exist on the hard drive, and are in fact not bootable at all, and are useless in absence of the recovery partition.

Is this the case, and is this "The Way Things Are" with all PC manufacturers and Windows Vista+ nowadays? How do I get my hands on actual bootable DVDs?

I've emailed Acer support. I see an option on their site to purchase recovery disks, but I have the suspicion that these are the same non-bootable disks that I burned on the new system. Will Acer provide actual boot disks?