topping definition: 1. the action of a person or thing that tops 2. something that forms the top of, or is put on top of, something else; specif., any of various items put on the top of certain prepared dishes, as cheese or sliced meats or vegetables ...
HP Backup & Recovery Manager helps protect the data and system state of your HP computer by taking scheduled snapshots, which can be stored in a protected area on the primary hard drive, a secondary hard drive, a network drive, or on external optical media.
You need to buy recovery disks from HP. It looks like you've somehow hosed your Vista installation, so HP Recovery Manager can't start. As for the Primary Partition question, a hard disk can have up to 4 primary partitions. It will try to boot from the one that is marked Active. Any primary partition may be bootable, using a boot manager.