Brian said:
Well, I'll look into this stuff. Thank you.
The thing that kinda irked me and made me leery is when I bought the
computer from future shop and they only gave me a recovery disk. I never was
given the windows installation cd. I asked the guy who gave me the computer
at the desk, and even called the tech guys later. They told me they only give
the recovery disk.
Would this suffice for what you're telling me, or if my entire system
crashed? This would be exactly how I started up my system when I received it,
not with everything I installed and changed/modified the last 3 years I'v
owned this computer.
A recovery disc (CD or DVD) is intended to handle the situation, that your
only hard drive broke. You bought a new drive and installed it inside the
computer case as a replacement. If you use the recovery disc, it installs
an image of a factory C: partition, prepares an empty D: partition perhaps,
and might store a copy of the recovery disc in a third (hidden) partition.
The intent of a recovery disc, is not quite the same as a "repair install"
you might do with a Microsoft installer CD. A "repair install" attempts
to preserve user data and settings. A "recovery CD" or recovery partition,
may erase everything in sight, as it is intended to return the machine to
a factory state. And that is why, a user should read the manual that comes
with the machine carefully, to understand just what they're getting with
their machine.
It is possible to buy a computer, with a real Windows CD bundled with it.
I bought one at a local chain (Eurocom). So you don't have to accept computers with
"recovery" partition schemes. You can get a real CD if you want. I bought
a computer for a relative, and one of the options was for it to ship with
a real CD in the box. It was just as expensive as buying the CD at Best Buy,
so there was no saving involved by doing so. It does mean, that there
is no function key that the owner can press, that will wipe out the hard
drive
*******
When you get a pre-built computer, there are two things to address.
1) Immediately burn a recovery CD. The recovery setup on a pre-built
computer, is prepared to burn *one* set of media. If you want to make
duplicate copies of the recovery media, you do that outside the manufacturers
tool flow. You might also want to use a utility that can make an
ISO9660 image of the burned CD or DVD, so you can make more discs
in the future. The recovery software keeps track of whether it has
burned *one* copy, and won't let you burn another one. So protect
the contents, or be prepared to pay $50 later to get the discs.
2) Read the section of the manual, that addresses what pressing the recovery
function key would do. Such as erase all user data, format the partitions,
or whatever. Once you've read that section of the manual, you'll likely
want to immediately invest in some external disk(s) and some backup software.
The purpose of the backups, is to have a copy of important user data, for
when the day comes that the recovery feature must be used.
HTH,
Paul
