Sorry I didn't notice.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/p...&lang=en&cc=us

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...370390&lang=en

Very few motherboards have the capability of booting external drives and I do not see that this one would.

I have already created recovery disks, but the problem is, the software isn't Windows Vista's installer, it runs HP's special recovery manager software. It doesn't state anywhere that it can simply repair the bootloader without destroying all of my data. I don't have the storage to back everything up.

Wouldn't hurt to ask HP:

http://ipgweb.cce.hp.com/ipgna/calle...&lang=en&cc=us