Solved Manufacturer's recovery partition

[bagua7]

I want to back up my system by cloning the entire HDD. I have a 25GB recovery partition created by the notebook manufacturer, ASUS, as part of the OEM Recovery Disks.

Should I also include it with the Windows partitions or just ignore it altogether?

Thanks in advance.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

You say you want to clone the entire HDD. If you mean that, yes, you'd have to include the 25 GB partition.

If you exclude it, you would not then later be able to recover to factory specifications using that 25 GB partition. It wouldn't exist.

You probably can make a set of recovery disks that will provide the same functionality as the recovery partition, although those disks would not be as reliable as the partition.

And of course you may have little or no interest in ever being able to restore to factory specifications, in which case you can exclude the recovery partition.

Lastly--I wouldn't consider a clone to be a backup. If you want to back up, think about imaging rather than cloning.

 

[Damian Adelle]

ignatzatsonic is right, you should prefer a back up. In my case, I recently bought an ACER netbook, it came with a Windows 8 recovery partition, and some other manufacturer utilities. I haven't liked Win 8 so much to use it yet, and I didn't liked the idea of having 50 GB of space lying around in a recovery partition, and I never liked the manufacturer choosing what's right for me, so I did a complete formatting, and installed my good ol' Win 7 Ultimate against a lot of people advise to not delete that partition (which is legit anyway, it's good advice too since that voided any warranty from getting Support). Right now I don't regret that decision at all, and I particularily had never the need to use at any point the recovery partition, lest any support, and I had Client Support before, and it's not that good anyway. I use Redo-Backup by the way, it's really simple and friendly to use. But again, that's my POV, if you like to keep that partition by the manufacturer by fear of anything-can-happen-in-the-future, it's a good idea too.

RedoBackup:
Redo Backup Bare Metal Restore Solution GUI Backup Open Source GPL Recovery

 

[bagua7]

So what should I do if I ever need to restore my system (without having to do a fresh install which is way to slow and time consuming...going through all those Win updates is just insane) if I encounter a situation that requires recovering Win 7.

I got here Macrium Reflect free ed. Should I just back up the system using this tool?

Thanks again.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

So what should I do if I ever need to restore my system (without having to do a fresh install which is way to slow and time consuming...going through all those Win updates is just insane) if I encounter a situation that requires recovering Win 7.

I got here Macrium Reflect free ed. Should I just back up the system using this tool?

Yes. Make an image every week or every month or every quarter. Whatever suits you.

Most important points:

You must make a "recovery disk" by burning a CD within Macrium. You use it to boot your computer when you want to restore the previously saved image. Use the "Win PE" method in the Macrium menu. After the disk is burned, confirm it will in fact boot your PC.

You must have somewhere to store the image files and that cannot be on a partition that is part of the image. So if you want to make an image of C and later restore C, the image file must be stored on D or E or F or whatever. Each image file is fairly large---about 40 to 50 percent of the space occupied by the imaged partition. It's preferable to store the image file on a completely separate hard drive rather than on another partition on the same hard drive.

You must make an image of both C and any other partitions that contain boot files, such as "system reserved" if you have such a partition. Some OEM builders put boot files in other partitions, so you should investigate where that might be if you have an OEM PC. A screen shot of Windows Disk Management should reveal this information. If necessary, you can move boot files to C.

There are tutorials for using Macrium on this site.

 

[bagua7]

All good, I managed to back up and clone Windows using Macrium. Thanks again.