Recovery disks - how does it work?

I have just burned two recovery DVDs - but how does it work?

If I reinstall from these two DVDs - will I get exactly the state of my machine I have at the moment? Or I will have to install all the applications one by one again and I will get into the troubles desrcribed in various threads of this forum?


regards
Paul

 

The recovery DVDs contain a factory image. When you use them, you'll restore your SZ to exactly the same state you bought ur machine

 

If you want something other than the factory image - i.e. you've already installed programs and such - you'll have to use a program like Norton's Ghost to make an image of your hard drive which can serve as a backup. The Sony recovery disks are not meant to capture what you have at the time, just the base Sony config.

 

Thank you! That was the answer I was looking for. Quick and precise ;-)

Do you know if there is any way to split C into two disk partitions without reinstalling from recovery disks (without reinstalling windows) ?

 

You can use a utility like Partition Magic to split a drive.
http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/system_performance/pm80/index.html

Cheers

P.

 

And anything for free? I found some freeware DOS programs for Partitioning ... but nothing really for XP so I could split the 100 GB C partition into C and D.....

Pay 70 USD just to split the partition once in the lifecycle of the computer is maybe too much....

 

So when you first got the SZ, does it have some kind of recovery partition on its hard drive or something?

When you use the recovery DVDs to reinstall, does it make use of this recovery partition? Or all it needs are the DVDs?

More importantly, how does this recovery partition work?

P.S. Because I read another thread that talked about a working way of semi-restore that seems to worked perfect except that method is for people who doesn't want to keep the recovery partition......so after reinstalling with this method, and I need to format the machine again, can I stil use the recovery DVDs? (now that the recovery partition si gone)
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=44587

 

You can recover using the CD's OR the recovery partition. You can even recover the recovery partition with the CD's if you happen to lose it somehow, or have deleted it. They are redundant backups (thats a good thing).