Need help using recovery on usb stick

I want to more or less store a backup to a usb stick, so that I can remove my HDD, install an msata, and then boot using the usb stick, and then restore everything onto my msata.

I have opened up Rescure and Recovery. When you select backup to hard drive, it asks if you want to create recovery media on external storage.
I selected yes, and performed this on a blank usb stick.
When if finished after a few minutes, I checked the drive and it only saved about 450mb of data to it. Clearly it did not save everything to it!
It seems it just installed the boot screen backup software, with maybe a few settings with older restore points.

So how do I backup everything to my usb so I can install everything from usb?
When the full backup has finished to my local hard drive, do I just copy that across to the same usb?
edit: the full backup to my hard drive finished. I can't see a physical place that this stored to, i only see it if i select the restore option.
The Lenovo recovery virtual Q drive is still there, not sure if this is the updated recovery or the factory condition recovery? why is this so confusing!


Thanks!

edit: I just found the option in R&R if I click on "change schedule" i can change it to my usb.
So i pressume i just backup again to usb.
And i presumre the Q drive is only the factory backup, and any subsequent backups do not overwrite the q backup.
Yes/no?

 

I have never tried what you are trying to do, mainly because I don't have a USB stick that is large enough to hold my backup (from ANY product or tool).

I use Acronis True Image Home 2010 and it works fine for taking a complete backup to external drive, and doing restores to nearly any target type.

 

I think the R&R program is just for making those small backups..I'm not completely sure, but there should be a different backup method in the lenovo tools which will let you create the full backup. The way I did it (not sure if it was through R&R or not), i have a small 4gb jump drive that has the boot files, then the backup image is on an external hard drive. I will check when I get home

 

OK I have set up a recovery usb, and a backup on an external drive.
I installed my 80gb msata, and removed the HDD.
I turned it on, pressed the blue think vantage button to boot from the temporary device. I actually didn't pick the usb or external HDD in the next field because i wanted to restart (as i connected the external HDD late), so i clicked ESC, but it ended up going to the R&R screen, and it showed me the name of the backup i had saved to the external hard drive.

It started backing up, but then stopped, stating that there was no enough memory on my C drive, and asking me to increase the partion size.

Is this because I need to format the msata drive?
Ill put the HDD back in, and see if i can format the msata drive...

edit: ok i can't even start windows now. i think i need to go into the bios and make it boot from the HDD again (instead of the external drive or msata), but i get a screen asking me to insert windows installation disk to repair it.
Is there another way of booting the BIOS screen? I'll try some function keys. otherwise i'll have to use the recovery usb stick
honestly can't get why there's no step by step on how to do this on these forums! I'd do it but clearly I have no clue
EDIT2: yep F1 got me into the bios. changed it to boot to the HDD (took me a while to realise you need to move it up the list, not just select it)

Still wondering what to do with the msata. it doesn't show in windows, but I ran diskpart, and it could see the 74gb of the msata drive.
Intel have a disk migration program. I think i'll just try that rather than messing around with lenovos R&R. Is that a good option?

edit3: there was some sort of device/signature conflict. went into drive manamgement, changed the drive from offline to online. it's fully visible as a D drive.
will now clone it using intels acronis software. hopefully that's ok and doesn't cause any alignement problems?

 

What an adventure..!

BTW, you can also use F10 to choose what device to boot from, it'll be a one-time deal, which is useful for this type of activity.

Regarding alignment, I don't know if cloning will misalign things, I've read around here that the Lenovo recovery automatically aligns it properly with SSDs..

 

I installed Intel 310 msata using Lenovo Recovery. In my case it took 2 DVD's since I didn't want to use USB drive. All in all the whole process went very well and quick. Must say having windows on my msata drive runs circles around my old set-up

 

Yeah i did notice that f10 option when in the bios screen.
took me ages to realise i was changing the lan boot device, not the actual boot drive and for like an hour i thought i had stuffed the computer. so stressful!
(I thought where it says >BOOT in the bios screen, that that was just a heading, not a sub menu)

Yeah I heard that it would be fine using the R&R software, that's why i went down that path. But when searching for drivers etc to see if i needed to format the msata drive, i found intels acronis disk migration software, and decided that looked much easier. And it was! It's instructions clearly show it being used to clone onto an ssd (not specifying the source), so I suppose it's fine. I think people here are too obsessed with doing clean installs! (maybe understandale if you have other laptops with a lot more bloatware)

Oh and yeah HDD is out, msata is in and running great!
Just need to delete the recovery partion (my old 320gb will have my factory backup), and then install my 9.5mm 1TB samsung M8, which will involve some dremelling to remove the 4 tabs at the bottom to make it fit. The adventure continues!

 

won't that void your warranty?

 

yeah but seeing as I bought it from the states through a freight forwarder meaning I don't have an actual receipt for it, plus i'll be travelling for a year with it, warranty is not really something that will be usefull for me.
plus if it was something like the screen played up, they wouldn't blame your modification, unless your mod had something to do with it.

 

What ThinkPad are you doing all of this on? The X1 or X220?