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    Can I make a recovery partition on my laptop so I wont have to use recovery CD's?

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by Blemish, May 21, 2008.

  1. Blemish

    Blemish Notebook Consultant

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    Hey everyone,

    I just bought my girlfriend a secondhand dell latitude d410. It came pre-installed with a clean version of windows xp pro, all the needed drivers, but without the xp discs and without dell recovery CD's.

    Now, if something happens (nasty virus or any other kind of problem) I want to be able to recover the laptop the way it is now. The thing is though, the laptop has an external optical drive (connected through USB). So regular recovery CD's may not work (not sure if I'm able to boot from the USB CD drive).

    So my question is this. Is it possible to not use the CD drive to recover at all, and use a recovery partition instead? I have a version of Norton Ghost that I can use. Am I able to backup everything to a recovery partition, and if anything happens, completely recover it from there?

    Sorry for the long story and complicated question. thanks in advance
     
    Blemish, May 21, 2008
    #1
  2. ScuderiaConchiglia

    ScuderiaConchiglia NBR Vaio Team Curmudgeon

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    Do you have a floppy drive on the system? Which version of Ghost do you have. The Ghost 2003 I have can create a bootable floppy. I have a spare partition on my hard drive. I boot from the Ghost 2003 floppy and create an image of my C: drive on the spare partition. Then if I ever need to recover I can boot with the floppy and copy the image back.

    I also have a D: partiton for all my data including the My Douments folder, Favorites folder and Outlook.PST files. That way if I recover from the image, none of my data is lost.

    All this is on an old Sony. On my newer Sony I can boot from a CD or DVD so I have the same basic setup, but I can image to CDs or DVDs and have Ghost 2003 make the first disk bootable.

    Gary
     
    ScuderiaConchiglia, May 21, 2008
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  3. Phil

    Phil Retired

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    If the cd drive is bootable you can use Acronis True Image. Very good program imo.
     
    Phil, May 21, 2008
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  4. Blemish

    Blemish Notebook Consultant

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    thanks for the answers. i will have to check if the CD drive , though external, is bootable (cant now cos the laptop is at my girlfriend's house). Unfortunately I have no floppy drive either.

    I'm gonna check all that and get back at ya if I cant figure it out.
     
    Blemish, May 21, 2008
    #4
  5. Phil

    Phil Retired

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    It propably is bootable, otherwise it'd be impossible to install OS or recovery cd's.
     
    Phil, May 21, 2008
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  6. ttupa

    ttupa Tech Elitist NBR Reviewer

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    Many BIOSs have the option to boot to USB device (this would include CD drives), so that's where I would check.
     
    ttupa, May 21, 2008
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  7. Phil

    Phil Retired

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    Yes checking the bios or pressing escape while booting will propably do the trick.
     
    Phil, May 21, 2008
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