Possible to make a recovery partition?

Well the machine comes with a recovery disc creator (for which i need 4 DVD - r discs), but I dont want to do that.. Is it possible to store the recovery contents onto a partition and whenever i need to do a factory reset, i can just install form the hard drive?

I owned a sony bfore, and it had a paritioned hard-drive for recovery.

 

Yes, you can use a partition utility (like gparted -- easy from an ubuntu livecd) to copy the partition to a usb stick with enough room. You'll have to do a raw copy of it, so any extra space on the usb stick will be wasted unless you then create an extra partition on it in the remaining space. You can also use a tool like dd (also easy from an ubuntu cd) to create an image file. You'd do something like:

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/backup.img

Then you can write this image to any USB media you'd like (also with dd) when the time comes for recovery.

 

If you're talking about the G73/G53, there should already be a hidden recovery partition on your HDD. A quick way to check that would be to boot from a live gparted cd and check your HDD/s, you'll see a recovery partition that is around 18-20GB.

EDIT: ninja'ed by ALLurGroceries. If you already have a hidden recovery partition, you could just clone it to another flash drive/USB stick. Note though that the recovery partition that comes with the laptop comes with all the bloatware initially on the machine. Personally, i'd do a clean install then make the recovery partition.

Also check this post from Chastity: http://www.asusrog.com/forums/showthread.php?1150-G73-Series-Driver-and-Application-Reference. You can download the iso for the windows 7 install and use the product key under your laptop to activate the installation if you want a backup solution to recover by doing a clean install of windows 7. You can also download the utilities and drivers from there and keep the files on another hard drive in case anything goes wrong, even if you have a G53, most of the components are the same and the drivers/utilities are the same as well.

 

Oops, right. I thought OP meant transfer the recovery partition onto external media. The Ai recovery utility just copies what is already on your hard disk. You can access the recovery partition with F9 at startup (as long as your MBR hasn't been modified).

It's generally a good idea to have a backup of that since if your hard disk fails your entire system is toasted, recovery partition and all.

 

So if i want to do a factory reset by using this hidden partition, how would i do this?

 

By pressing F9 at boot like ALLurGroceries said.