This paper describes a benchmark for measuring system recovery on a non-clustered standalone system. A system's ability to recover from an outage quickly is a critical factor in overall system availability. General purpose computer systems, such as UNIX based systems, tend to execute the same sequence or series of steps during system startup and outage recovery. Our experience has shown that these steps are consistent, reproducible and measurable, and can thus be benchmarked. Additionally, the factors that create variability in restart/recovery can be bound and represented in a meaningful way. A defined set of measurements, coupled with a specification for representing the results and system variables, provide the foundation for system recovery benchmarking.