what is a recovery disc?

So i bought a laptop a while ago and right after i bought it did a clean install of vista home premium 64-bit. I know im supposed to make a recovery disc but im not sure what recovery disc is. Is it something to save all my drivers and softwares or just softwares or just drivers? Also i installed nortan 360 and it says i need to configure a back up. What is back up? is it the same thing as recovery disc?

 

A recovery disc is a copy of a hidden partition on your harddrive. If your machine experiences a major problem(ex: you accidentally deleted a critical OS file, got a virus or otherwise hosed your machine in one way or another), you can put this disc in your drive and then boot from it. It will wipe your system and set the machine to the way it was the first day, with all the manufacturer installed programs and the OS.

A recovery disc can also be useful to bring your machine back to the way it was on day one, if you indent to sell it.

I think the backup that Norton is talking about might be the Windows backup created by the utility that comes with Vista.

 

haha ok ill do it here. I have the operating system for windows vista. But when i reinstalled the thing i had no drivers installed here. I dont wanna go through the hassle of installing the drivers again. In Norton antivirus it says it saved all my music files and downloaded stuff so i dont think i have to worry about that. So any idea?

 

I don't see how you can get around installing the drivers, unless Vista can successfully work with all your hardware with it's built in drivers, which I doubt. I think you will have to find the drivers for your machine from the manufacturer's website and install them . This is really the best way and one of the reasons for the clean install. You are getting the newest and most up to date drivers for your machine, which you want especially with Vista since it is so new and has so many bugs to work out still. If you had made a recovery disc it would have had the drivers on it, but they would still be old. They would be the drivers that were installed on the machine from day one.

So basically you didn't really do anything wrong. You did a clean install and now you need to get the drivers and install them. This is what I did as well and it is the best way to keep the machine up to date and bloat free. Even if you had made a recovery disc and used it at a later date, it would wipe out your clean install with the bloatware install and install old drivers. I don't see any point to that unless you wanted to bring the machine back to day one condition for some reason. Most people also make the recovery discs before the clean install just as a backup/failsafe, where if they screw up the clean install somehow, they can start over again from the way the machine was and try the clean install again.

 

A recovery disc is NOT another partition on your hard drive. A recovery partition is another partition on your hard drive that's hidden during normal use. A recovery disc is a burned DVD/CD that will "recover" your computer to the state that it's in when you create the disc. Generally, computer manufacturers have you create them since it's cheaper than actually sending you recovery discs, and if you don't, they can charge you a lot for them afterwards.

You probably have to go through the hassle of downloading all the drivers again since that's just the way that Windows works. If you create a recovery disc, it should include all the drivers with it. If you didn't, I'd suggest downloading all the drivers, and then burning those to a CD to go along with the install disc, so you can just go from installing the operating system to installing the drivers. That's the easiest way to go about it. There are ways to create a slipstream install, but I find that's usually overkill. What I personally prefer to do is get my machine to a stable state, freshly installed, and then just make an image of the hard drive (I'm a Linux nerd, so I use dd and so on, but you can use things like Acronis TrueImage or whatnot as well). But those are mostly helpful if you reimage your machine a lot, rather than if you only do it once or twice a year, like most Windows users.