difficulty making recovery disks

I ordered a G73 from Costco and it arrived yesterday. The first thing I wanted to do was make recovery disks so I started the process. The first disk burned fine but I made three coasters trying to burn the second one. I kept getting an error message about an exception. I can`t remember the specific message, unknown exception maybe. I couldn`t see anything about this issue in the stickies so thought I`d ask if it`s an issue with the computer, or if starting the process over is likely to result in success. I don`t want to keep making coasters, and I do want backup disks.

 

Stormlady, If you have an external hard drive with sufficient space, I would recommend not using this method.
I would download a free program like Paragon Backup & Recovery (Advanced) Free Edition - Free Download
and doing an image (AKA backup or recovery file) to the external hard drive. I have read many mixed results about the asus recovery utility.

OR use the utility built into windows 7 - but do the back up to an external hard drive Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Backup and Restore. Hope this helps, Josea

 

How much space would it take up on the external HD to do it that way?

Win 7 has a utility for backup disks that is different than the one that prompted me when I turned on the computer? Can that be used to make backup disks as well? I have a my book and a my passport totally 1.5 Tb, so it shouldn`t be a big issue to backup to the external, I`ve just always made disks so that`s what I know,

 

^^^^
Yes windows 7 has a utility, and it is distinct from the ASUS one. If for instance your total C drive 40 GIG, the backup with the utility in control panel - backup and restore - create system image- will shrink it about 25 % resulting in about a 30 GIG image, thus easily fitting on the Passport.
If you really want disks, it will create them instead of the image to the external hard drive.

 

Ahhh, I just assumed it was windows that gave me the prompt when I started up last night. Reading a bit today I learned it wasn`t. Seems like backing to the external would be a good plan. Is it any faster, or can I expect it to still take 2-3 hours.

I`m very impatient to try WoW on it, I`ve been playing on a netbook, lol.

 

Stormlady, you can copy across your entire OS partition to any other hard drive using a lovely GUI that comes with parted magic. You'll need to boot from the CD (tap Esc whilst booting, select the CD/DVD drive) and then once parted magic has loaded up open the gparted/partition editor program. Then it's a simple copy any partitions you want from the first HDD, select the second in the drop down box and then paste. Note you can copy it back at any time for a fully working OS. Personally I think using gparted from a LiveCD environment is much better than anything else. And yes, it will still take a few hours unfortunately, depends on how much data there is to copy and the r/w speeds of the HDDs involved.