Create recovery USB for ASUS U31?

Hi,

I just got my U31jg and understand that I have only the recovery partition to rely on. What if the hard drive crashes? Can I create a USB stick with recovery files?? The included cd with "asus driver and utility ver 2.0" is of no use in the event of a system crash.

How do you manage your recovery files?

/j

 

You should have a program preinstalled called Asus AI recovery which will help you create your own back up disks. It will image your hard drive across roughly 6 dvds
It looks like the U31jg doesnt have an optical drive tough so to make those you'll need an external

 

I too have been trying to create a recovery USB for my U35 laptop
I did use the AI recovery burner and a virtual DVD burner to create 5 ISO images of the 5 recovery discs which I have on an external HDD
I tried to copy the first one and even all of them on a bootable USB no luck.
(see my post missing .wim files U35) I also unhid and copied the whole hidden recovery partition onto an external HDD but have not been able to make a bootable USB from that one either.
would be VERY interested in knowing if anyone with an asus has succeeded in this quest. why cant asus modify the recovery burner to allow for creation of the disks on a USB? (i called US tech support to ask this they were absolutely useless and I wrote to main company HQ in Taiwan of course nary a word from them..... come on geeks - cant someone figure this one out??

 

How are you creating this bootable USB key? Maybe the boot image on the CD is causing a problem with the way USB boots.

It might be simpler just to buy a USB<->SATA adapter for a desktop ODD or get a slim USB one. I used one to burn the backup disks for my UL20FT and it worked fine (though it wanted to put in a 20GB restore partition onto a 60GB SSD, but that's another story :roll .

Or maybe use Paragon, Ghost or Acronis to make an image instead?

 

interesting thought maybe i will play with acronis and see if it can image either the full contents of the recovery partition or the 5 recovery cd's onto a USB. and then hope that it boots.
but as a side note, i was trying to use acronis startup recovery manager to create a hidden partition for boot (press F11) and it does not work, possibly because of the way win 7 boots, or possibly because of the way win 7 boots or possibly because some of the win 7 boot files may be withing the asus hidden recovery partition. acronis support is supposedly working on this issue.........
I suppose I could use acronis to create a bootable usb with an image from my system partition but that would be "custom" with all the additions and deletions. what I was looking for at the outset was to create a bootable USB with the asus factory restore.....

 

OK - I was able to use win_setup_from_USB 1.0beta7 to create a bootable USB then copied all the files that I had previously copied from the hidden asus recovery partition.
restart boot from USB - i get the "windows is installing files" screen, then a grey background screen - EXACTLY AS when doing a restore from the hidden recovery partition.
EXCEPT - instead of asking what language I want (as it does when run from the recovery partition on the HDD) the grey screen vanishes and windows reboots nornally.
so - I did a one to one exact copy of the hidden partition files. must be something off in a config file - any ideas????