New laptop - backing up OS
lea27
Posts: 11,426 Forum Member
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Hi all,
Bought a new laptop today and they told me to back up the operating system onto disk, is this really necessary, why would you have to do it and how do you do it?
Bought a new laptop today and they told me to back up the operating system onto disk, is this really necessary, why would you have to do it and how do you do it?
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Follow the instruction in the manual or from the make back up option or whatever it's called, it doesn't take long and it's worth a blank cd or dvd.
Yes....
The initial back-up you are being told to perform now will restore your laptop to it's current state if you get a serious problem, eg disk failure or a massive file corruption. But you still need those incremental back-ups to restore your data, which is probably more vital in many respects than the initial OS back-up
After all if all else fails you can pop into PC World and buy a copy of Windows to re-install the operating system. But PC World don't sell all those irreplaceable family photos, important letters and documents or whatever that you accumulate over the years.
Most have it, plus many also have a hidden part of the hard disk you can also access when turning the power on. They both allow you to restore the laptop back to its factory condition.
On my Asus, it took 4 CDs and about an hour to complete.
And to add to the above advice about plugging in the mains, also ensure you leave the laptop on a hard surface - not a sofa or bed. It'll get hot.
As soon as your PC starts up, tap at the F10 key.
This should give you the option to enter System Restore mode, or something similar.
look closely at what appears on the screen as your PC starts. It might require that you press something else but it's usually F10.
Once you've got the Sytsem Restore utility running DO NOT allow it to actually DO a system restore.
If all you get is a message saying something like "Your system will now be restored to factory configuration. Press Y to continue or N to quit" then press "N" and have a rethink.
If your system restore utility is more comprehensive it might give you the option to burn a set of recovery disks.
In this case, follow the instructions, feed it the required disks and give yourself a pat on the back.
If the system restore utility won't allow you to burn recovery disks then your only hope (for doing it simply) is that somewhere, from within W7, there's a utility supplied by the manufacturer which'll allow you to burn recovery disks.
I'm currently in a similar position.
I have a laptop with all the recovery files in a hidden part of the HDD and the recovery software (A thing called PC Angel) is very rudimentary and won't allow me to burn recovery disks.
In that case, making a copy of the recovery partition of the HDD is proving (for me, at least) to be quite complex.
One other option is to do a system restore on your PC so that it's totally clean and then use software such as Acronis TrueImage to create an image of the entire HDD which can be written back onto the HDD if everything goes horribly wrong in the future.
That's not a very elegant solution but it will work.
What make/model PC do you have (look underneath)?
You should have the facility to backup just the original OS using a utility from the manufacturer.
That's probably what I'll end up doing with my laptop too.
It's far from ideal and there should really be some way to actually create recovery DVDs from the data on the HDD but some manufacturers simply don't give customers this option.
Quite what they expect people to do when their HDD is physically damaged is anybody's guess.
If your harddrive were to fail, or if you wanted to easily upgrade your drive, you need those restore discs. Do not delay.
Worst are when they only let you make restore discs once, as if you were going to do something with multiple copies, it's ridiculous.