Create partition before Samsung Recovery Solution?

Hi,

I have had a Samsung RF511 laptop since April 2012. I now need to restore it to how it was out of the box. Am I right in thinking that I use the Samsung Recovery Solution 5 software to do this? I have approx. 3GB of personal data that I want to keep however, such as photos, etc. If I restore the laptop then presumably I will lose all of this, so can I create a new partition first and transfer my personal data to this before restoring? I presume the laptop will be restored to the C drive and any partitions I've created will remain intact, i.e. the laptop restore will not delete any new partitions I've just created?

Thanks

 

In SRS5, performing a Complete Restore (under Advanced options) does indeed re-partition the disk and wipe everything (except the Recovery partition). However, you can also choose a non-destructive Restore, which supposedly preserves your data. I forget the exact naming of it, but it's described in the manual.

That said, I would never recommend to perform any restore in Recovery without first backing up important data to an external drive. 3GB of data will fit on a cheap USB flash drive or memory card. Remember, you always want to two copies of important data, so if you choose the Complete Restore (where you know the copy on the disk will be lost) you want two different external backups, in case one of them should fail when you restore.

 

Thanks and sorry I meant 300GB!

 

Got it. Yeah, you'll need an external HDD for that. I still highly recommend you get that and backup your data, regardless of what you choose to do in Recovery.