back up issues.very confused

bit of a newbie when it comes to this.previous laptops i either had the windows vista disc already or the laptop told me to back up as soon as i 1st switched it on.

however ive just bought myself a samsung r780 i5 500GB hard drive running windows 7.
i was asked when i 1st turned it on how much space i wanted to use for partition space for my D drive.
Having no idea and knowing my previous laptop with vista had 10GB i still did a search and most people said between 25-30GB.
My laptop in the end wouldnt allow less than 39GB so i set the partition size to 40.5GB

I then loaded all my programs and documents onto my laptop which used up 138GB and was then given a reminder to backup my laptop.

Realising i only have 40.5GB in my D drive i realised i would just back up the system image which i believe is just what was on my laptop when i bought it.
However everytime i tried to back it up it tells me theres not enough room.

So now i have a 40.5GB partiton D drive and no way of back things up into it.

All my music,documents are backed up onto an external hard drive so all i want to do is back up everything so i can get my laptop working if i need to wipe it clean and start again.

Many thanks if you can help.

 

I can't imagine a brand new computer booting up and asking for a partition size. Probably less than 1% of customers would even have a clue how to answer that question. Are you sure this was a NEW computer?

I would contact Samsung and ask them how to create Recovery discs for your laptop model.

A System Image is an image of the your complete HD (or just the partitions you, wish to image), not just an image of your OS. In this case it is greater than 138GB. You will have to save that image to your external HD. Or, make your D drive partition greater than your C drive and save it there (not a good idea, if your HD becomes defective, your toast).