Inspiron 1545 - Backup OS on USB drive?

Greetings all! (and a very Merry Christmas as well)

I have a Inspiron 1545 working perfectly well (except for missing "r" key) and was wanting to copy the operating system over to CD's or a USB flash drive in case of a hard drive collapse. Called Dell and was informed by a foreigner it could not be done. I'm skeptical though. Is it possible or not? Laptop will be 4 years old in March 2014. Thanks all!

 

114 reviews and 0 responses? did I do something wrong?

 

No they are giving you wrong information you should have factory restore cd/dvd if not you should've ordered them to have them for your system should it fail on you. To backup to cd/dvd that is the windows backup feature that does this and unless your system was clean and not bloated doing this would work but if it was factory install I would recommend you getting factory restore cd/dvd that will restore you computer back should the HDD fail on you but also make sure you backup all and any data/files you created as restore cd/dvd wipe clean the HDD to put it back to factory install.

 

I'm assuming you want to make some sort of image of the OS rather than a direct clone? There are plenty of programs out there that will do that, including the built-in Windows utility as mentioned above. Go to Control Panel > Backup and Restore > Create System Image.