What's "Burn Recovery Discs" supposed to mean?

Hey there,

Im just going through the clean install tutorial and its telling me to "Burn Recovery discs" without telling me what that exactly is.

Being a Mac user, im not familiar with this. What's a recovery disc? Exactly what content do I need to copy? And can I just back it up on my external HD as supposed to burning it?

Cheers folks,

 

When you purchase a laptop, most manufacturers don't include a recovery disk (original software configured to your laptop). They used to in the past, but I guess they are trying to find ways to save money so now most partition your hard drive and put the recovery software in the smaller partition. So if you need to reinstall the OS or any other program for that matter, you would go to your partition to access those files. The problem is, if your hard drive crashes, you lose all the original software as well. That's where the burn recovery discs come in. By creating a recovery disc, you are simply just extracting the software from the partition onto discs. It's a really good way to protect your software in the even that the hard drive fails. By selecting that option, it should do all the work for you. You just need to supply the appropriate media.

 

Hi, on an HP, unless you specify otherwise when going through the online configurator, you don't get a physical set of Operating System and Driver disks. Instead, upon first boot, your reminded to burn a recovery disk image from within Windows. This allows you to restore the system to a factory configuration in case the recovery partition on the hard disk is damaged. Follow the steps in the recovery disk wizard to burn the disk.

As for backing up to an external hard disk-no, I don't think you will be able to use the recovery image on an external disk, it has to be burned onto Optical Media.

 

Ah ok, thanks for that.

I can see a 1GB "HP_Recovery" partition on my DV5, but I cant seem to access the files in it. The below text is as far as I get:
________________
Recovery Partition
Warning!

This area of your hard drive
(or partition) contains files used
for your PC Recovery.

Do not delete or alter these files.

Any change to this partition could
prevent any recovery later.
______________________________

How do I access the files beyond this so I can backup the recovery?

Cheers,

 

Also guys,

Because this "Recovery" thing is a separate partition, wouldnt it still be there even after a Clean Install?

And im just looking through the clean install tutorial, and it dosent seem as if you actually NEED to use this Recovery content?

Cheers,

 

Your notebook does not come with any physical disks which contain the OS and software that was originally installed on your notebook. This saves HP money and is passed on to the consumer in the form of a price savings.

When you burn the "Recovery Discs" you are making the physical disks containing the above software which in years passed were included by the computer manufacturers.

You may need these discs if you ever want to reinstall your original software in the event of HD problems/replacement or software issues you cannot correct any other way. They are also very handy for ready access to your original drivers.

Just backing up the partiution won't do much good as it is a special archive which must be read by HP software to reinstall the data.

Please do yourself a favor and perform the backup. It will only take a CD and one or two DVD's. I suggest DVD +R of good quality such as Sony, TDK, etc.

Edit: I have got to learn to type faster, 4 people responded while I was composing this

 

Yep, making that recovery sounds like a good idea.

Forgive me again because im new to Windows, but how can I reach this "Recovery manager" that the tutorial describes?

 

You don't access the actual partition to make the disks, you use the "Recovery Manager" software in the Start>All Programs menu.

 

Start -> All Programs -> Then find the HP utility or your manufacturer's utility that makes recovery disks.

After you make your recovery disks, you are safe to do a clean install.