Made a recovery disk under maintenance, exactly what can it do?

It is not that big, so what does it restore? Updates? personal files? The entire system os?
Will windows be as it was or will things be missing?

If you did a factory restore disk, then it will rebuild your computer to like-new condition, just like when you first bought it. A Windows "Recovery Disk", on the other hand, puts enough on the disk to get Windows up and running; but it doesn't save your personal files, nor the entire OS. Things could be missing, because it isn't a full backup of your hard drive.

You should do a backup of your hard drive; in this way, you will be able to recover everything. You could use Macrium Reflect Free to do this. Save the backup on an external hard drive. And don't forget to create the Macrium emergency restore disk, so that if your drive crashes, you can boot with that disk and do a restore onto another drive. And be sure to include the USB drivers when you are creating the emergency restore disk.

Please edit your profile with ALL your hardware specs.

The Win 7 program (%systemroot%\system32\recdisc.exe) only creates a boot able disk with tolls. It doesn't have any backup files. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...em-repair-disc

Use Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free to create a disk image (save it on an external drive). It will allow you to restore all content (OS and data).

Can macrium reflect free do just the OS system files versus the personal data files?
I have a separate 3tb drive I use for personal files and video recordings. The 1 TB drive has win7 on there.
Mostly that 1TB goes to waste, only used for the OS.

It would be nice to just back up a bootable system leaving out the extra personal files. Anyhow that drive has about 40gb, what size would an image be?

I am on win10 on its own drive, win7 has its own drive too. Can the image be made of the non running win7 drive and written to the 3tb drive? As in running macrium from win10, I suppose so.

Please edit your profile with ALL your hardware specs.

Do you have a dual boot system (Win7 and Win10)?

To boot from a drive and make an image of the other drive is the best scenario.
As the disk image is compacted, it can be very less in size compared to the in use size of the HDD.

sdowney717 said:

Can macrium reflect free do just the OS system files versus the personal data files?
I have a separate 3tb drive I use for personal files and video recordings. The 1 TB drive has win7 on there.
Mostly that 1TB goes to waste, only used for the OS.

It would be nice to just back up a bootable system leaving out the extra personal files. Anyhow that drive has about 40gb, what size would an image be?

I am on win10 on its own drive, win7 has its own drive too. Can the image be made of the non running win7 drive and written to the 3tb drive? As in running macrium from win10, I suppose so.

If the non-running Windows 7 drive is on, then yes, Macrium can make an image of it. However, Macrium Reflect Free is somewhat limited compared to the paid version. I don't think it could back up just the OS part of the drive; but I may be wrong about that.

It sounds like you have three drives: one for data, one for Windows 7, and one for Windows 10. If this is the case, you could tell Macrium to backup just one of the drives, if all you want to backup is your data or your OS. In fact, I back up one drive at a time, rather than all of them, because Macrium seems to work better that way.


Since apparently you have three drives, you could power down, disconnect your data and Windows 10 drives, then do a clean install of Windows 7 on that drive. In this way, there is no way that the data or Windows 10 drives would be affected by the reinstall.

I have three drives in my computer: one for data, one for Windows 7, and one for Linux Mint. I have installed a SATA power switch so that I can switch the drives on or off as needed:

https://www.amazon.com/PW4101-Alumin...70_&dpSrc=srch

(I always power the computer down before switching any drives on or off.)

The data drive stays on; if I want to switch from Linux to Windows (or vice versa), I shut the computer down, power on and off the appropriate drive, then power on the computer. Like magic, I am in the other OS; and my data is always available, because that drive is always on.

If you had a SATA power switch like I have described, you could turn off all drives except your Windows drive, then power up and do a clean install of Windows 7. Then power down, turn on your data drive, then power up the computer. Your data would have been totally shielded from the clean install, then available once the install is done.

Macrium is nice, I imaged both win7 and win10 and have the images on the 3tb drive. win7 image size is 9gb, win10 is 20gb, so pretty small.

I do like linux also! I run ubuntu on my desktop.
For the media PC, I have been using win7 and WMC.
I did the free win10 upgrade and it did not go well, LOTS of grief and issues, very unstable, very slow, so I reinstalled another win7 on a separated drive. Then I wiped the upgraded win10 and reinstalled fresh clean and it has been ok, and did reactivate.

The clean install of win7 also tremendously sped up the boot and feels like new PC. IMO, may have had malware involved.

I was swapping between OS's by hitting 'esc' and selecting which drive to boot from. But I installed easybcd in win7 and told it to boot either 7 or 10, 7 is preferred due to using WMC.

Pretty much never going to use win10, but it is there if WMC eventually wont work anymore, which I give it a few years and the guide data will fail.

Please mark this thread as solved.