Lynella brought her sister's laptop in to get fixed, but she didn't make a copy of the hard drive before she did. Leo says techs usually wipe the drive or replace it and then restore the OS from a backup recovery disc. But that may not include the restore partitions that originally came with it. If they claim they restore to manufacturer specs, then it should have the recovery partition. If they refuse to restore that for her, then Lynella may be able to get recovery discs from the laptop manufacturer. Recovery discs are better anyway because then she still has it if the drive dies.
She then tried to use Fix-It Utilities 11 Professional, and since it worked on Windows 7 she thought it would work on Windows 8. She booted from the disc to try and see the hidden recovery partitions on the laptop. She also wanted to copy that hard drive to another drive. The disc told her that the partition was corrupt, so she exited the program and when she rebooted the computer, the computer said "operating system missing." Leo suspects that since she was using Fix-It Utilities 11, which is an older version, it may not have known how to deal with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) in Windows 8.
Now she's wondering if she shouldn't use any of utility programs she had for Windows 7 with Windows 8. Leo says to be careful because there's a big difference between BIOS and UEFI, so she should probably avoid those older programs on Windows 8.