hard drive recovery help?

Question

Hi I just got my self windows 7 home for my hard drive is there any think I can do so I can put a recovery on it so if my computer Go wrong I can put it back to how it was I don't want to have to format my hard drive all the time and put windows back on help please

Answer 1

You are best advised to do a back up to an external storage device such as a hard drive to achieve that, you can create a recovery partition on your installed hard drive, but if the hard drive is the component that fails then everything is lost.

A recovery partition is good though to repair damaged software contained on the working part of the hard drive.

Macrium Reflect is a good and free way of doing this, others are mainly 30 day free trials.

It will either clone the entire disc or just the data needed to reinstall the operating system, whichever you want;

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

After you have downloaded it register it and you will then get an e-mail explaining how to use it a short time later.

The full and rather tedious explanation from Microsoft about Macrium and reinstalling Windows for the last time is in the link below;

http://www.officialwindowsmagazine.com/news/reinstall-windows-for-the-last-time/

Regards, Bob.

Answer 2

You can create a disk image onto an external drive. That way, you can always restore everything back to the way it was. No point trying to create a restore partition on the same drive, for if it crashes, so does your recovery. Always use a secondary disk.

There are a few free imaging tools based on Linux (Clonezilla for example), or a commercial package like Acronis (they used to have a 30 day trial). There are some Acronis boot CDs out there on the web, but not sure about the legality of those.

Answer 3

Windows 7 has system restore so you can revert back to a restore point, which resets the registry and system files if you get a problem. But if you want to be able to restore the whole system as is [including software and user files] then you need to make an "Image Backup". You need to use special software for this and you will need to store it on a separate removable hard drive in case the main system drive fails.

You can get free image backup software to do this like O&O Express from here: http://www.filehippo.com/download_oo_diskimage_express/

Answer 4

the backup and restore options for windows

have got better.

Answer 5

theres a function to revert to certain day of the month, or even time, so it will undo any changes made to your computer.