Creating recovery media without optical drive?

I have an X220 on order, and I'm wondering how I'd go about creating recovery media for it. For normal use, no optical drive is no issue, but I would like to create disks so I can reset to factory settings in case my OS reinstall messes anything up. I do have another computer with a DVD-burner, can I burn the recovery media over the network using the optical drive in the 2nd computer? Or could I possibly burn the media to ISO images, transfer it to the other computer, and burn from there?

Thanks for any suggestions

 

I don't think you can do it over the network.

You could create a bootable USB stick. Also your laptop has a recovery partition.

 

Ahh, I figured I wouldn't be able to burn over the network. No surprise.

Can you create a bootable USB stick from the recovery partition?

I realize that there is the recovery partition on the disk, but my goal would be to install Windows on an Intel 310 SSD and then completely wipe the standard HDD and use it for storage. I realize I could reserve ~10gb for the recovery partition, but I'd far rather have bootable disks as well/instead of that.

 

You can probably shag a burner off ebay for $25 and it might not be a bad thing to have.

 

That would likely be a good plan. I'll check around on Newegg and Amazon to see what's available

 

That would still be very interesting to know...

 

If no definite answer will be given till tomorrow, I will try to test this. I have already made a recovery disks on an external USB hard drive. I can test whether it is possible to boot form them anyhow.



M.

 

Yes, you can. It will need to be of sufficient size, however, if you want the data and boot files on the same drive. Otherwise, it will place the boot files on the USB drive and then prompt you for a larger drive for the data files. Oh, and you can't make multiple drives--the tool will only allow you to do so once.

 

Would it be possible to use a cloning program such as Acronis or Ghost to clone the partitions on the USB flash drive to another equal sized one?

 

It actually doesn't create multiple partitions. As far as I can tell, it's just a bunch of files, folders, and more files. I haven't tried copying it to another drive and testing it, though--and it'll have to wait, since I did not bring them with me to the university.

 

Or in the UK, a LiteOn 8x Slim External Top-Load DVD-RW Drive reduced from £35 to £21 (use AMA5 for an extra £1 off):

LiteOn 8x Slim External Top-Load DVD-RW Drive - Black £21.99 - Free Delivery

 

From what I've learned about cloning is the first install has to be a clean one. Otherwise the alignment won't be set properly, but my knowledge is limited on this one.

 

My experience is you can use a Linux Live CD such as Clonezilla and clone over an existing file system. I've done it numerous times with success on various NTFS partitions

 

I didn't say you can't clone the drive, but that if you clone the drive over from the original install, the partition alignment won't be right and you need the alignment right for best performance.

 

As ZaZ has stated above, alignment ensures maximum performance but also as I understand it, an unaligned SSD will cause excessive writes to the cells which will dramatically shorten the life of the SSD.

 

Ahh, my bad. That would certainly make sense...and my plan was to do a clean reinstall to the SSD....

 

For persons wanting to image the drive or making images in general when you don't have dvd drives ... you can use Win7PE_SE booting from a USB stick. I like the patriot XT 16BG usb keys.

Basically you download Win7PE_SE, copy your Windows 7 dvd to a folder, run the winbuilder.exe that comes with Win7PE_SE and it will make an .iso file. Then you use Yumi-multiboot to write the .iso file to a USB key which also makes it bootable. Then you can copy over your ghost32 file (if using Ghost Solution Suite) and make or restore images.