System recovery discs- what if DVD drive fails?

Just trying to cover all my bases here. I've created the system recovery discs from the special partition. I'm wondering though, what if I need to restore my system to its factory state, but for some reason my DVD drive has failed? Is there a way to put the system recovery information on an external HDD, and boot from it?

I don't expect a situation like this to occur, but I figure, what the hell, might as well see if something can be done in the unlikely event it does happen.

 

Talk about a difficult to answer question!

If your DVD has failed and it's a single point of failure-then i think you have just that! Can you put the distribution on a seperate disk? Yes. Get an external drive or partition your disk and put it on. I'd do a practise run so the failure that is a concern to you isn't the first time.

Personally, I've never needed to replace the system disk data. I am unsure how it could fail.

Renee

 

Your first attempt should be to restore the OS is from the recovery partition which does not require an optical drive.

You could always buy another optical drive or an external one?

 

The DVD drive on a ThinkPad is hot-swap, so you can always call Lenovo and ask them to send you a new one (assuming your machine is still under warranty). If the warranty has expired you have four options:

• Borrow an optical drive from a friend/associate with a ThinkPad. This is easy for me since many of my friends have ThinkPads.
• Use an external optical drive, either purchased (around $40) or borrowed.
• Use a USB to SATA adapter with a desktop optical drive. The converters are around $15.
• Buy a new optical drive on eBay.

I wouldn't worry about it. I, on the other hand, failed to make recovery discs and then blew away the recovery partition. Which gets to be a problem if I want to sell the laptop.

 

I prefer the bootable USB recovery disk method for this very reason. My paranoia about spinning drive reliability, and the ease of acquiring the 8 gig thumbdrive necessary for the process, make it a very attractive option.

 

I'd love to have a bootable thumbdrive, but I couldn't figure out how to make one. When I go to the recovery partition to make recovery media, it only lets me use CDs or DVDs.

 

I personally am scared I will lose the flash drive... but with that being said, I did lose the recovery disks for my x301, but I was able to make an image of the HD, so that was able to make me another set ...

 

There is another option which is called do a backup.

Renee