how to use recovery media on external dvd writer

[Ahmed edris]

My Toshiba laptop had a hidden recovery partion that i used to make recovery dvds and now i formatted my hard disk so the recovery is now only on the dvds i have made but the problem is now my built in dvd writer does not work so i tried to use the recovery media on an external dvd writer but the toshiba recovery wizard cannot read the dvds from it . so please can any one tell me how to solve this problem or tell me can i move recovery dvd to my hard drive again

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

I've never tried booting from an external optical drive (never had to) so this may not work:

Make sure the optical drive is attached with Recovery Disc #1 inside it.
Turn on your laptop and immediately press and hold down 'F12' until a boot menu appears.
Use arrow key to highlight the external optical drive, then press <Enter>

If no optical drive is shown in the boot menu, or the laptop refuses to boot from it you will need to fix the non-working, built-in one, or replace it with a new one.