Other options are
a) to make a back up image.
(acronis, aoemi, easeus, macrium, paragon, etc.)
Some computer manufacturer's have preinstalled recovery which has additional options.
If available it may be of interest to view it or save it before a clean install.
b) If you want to you can always create your own recovery partition:
Factory recovery - Create a Custom Recovery Partition
Thanks for the recommendations. I'll look into what I need for image back ups due to moving to Win-10. Unfortunately, Norton Ghost was compatible up to Win-7, though I wonder how it would work under a MBR HDD under Win-10. I do usually do a full image back up after a complete and satisfactory system prep, as well as additional ones during the prep process just in case. Ultimately, there will be a master delivery installation back up to optical disc, usually either on BD-RE-DL (50 GB) or more likely these days, on BDXL-RE-TL (100 GB). DVDs are just utterly useless these days for many reasons. The self created recovery partition is interesting and I'll read up a bit more on it but doubtful I will want to use it because I prefer Ghost image files residing within a normal regular user partition with a regular drive letter rather than a special system partition.
Last edited by wintenprouser; 22 Sep 2019 at 16:48.
Macrium Reflect Home (paid for) or Free is what most people here use and recommend for backup.
I used to use Ghost but as you say, not compatible with a modern OS. If you used Ghost Explorer, you may like to know that you can mount a Macrium image and explore it with File Explorer like any other drive.
A Macrium image is a single file that can be kept on a regular partition. All my machines have a separate Data partition where I keep their Macrium images. Of course, that's no use if the drive fails, so I also back up the whole machine (including its Data partition) to a Macrium image on an external HDD.
I'll look into that a bit more, thanks. Interestingly, I noticed that it's compatible with as far back as Win-XP Pro SP3, which might be useful as well in my case I have a mix of different Windows systems still in fully functional use from Win-XP Pro SP3 to Win-7-Pro, as well as supporting some other users in these various Windows versions. Couldn't be bothered with Win-8 and skipped it and have no regrets.
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Yes, I like the ability to keep back up files in a regular user partition as I back up the image files first to HDD and eventually to large capacity optical discs nowadays (typically BDXL-RE-TL) for archival. Prefer to avoid backing up to another HDD which is the whole point of my back ups in any case though I do know a number of people that back up to external HDDs. I've done the same thing for years as you have as well with Norton Ghost as I can use its image browser to quickly restore any singular file / folder as needed and the back up images are already on a local HDD ready for access. If there's a problem I would just boot from the Ghost CD and restore drive C from the image storage partition. Symantec spun off Ghost to Veritas which is currently selling it as System Restore, which I believe was previously Symantec System Restore, and the user interface is even almost identical to Ghost 15.
I've also looked into Acronis but definitely don't want to deal with cloud back up. The output files of multiple generations of independent back ups must go to local HDD first then to BDXL-RE for long term archival. In the past this worked very well because Ghost 15 bootable program CD had built in Win-Vista which had UDF 2.50 native support which meant there were no problems reading directly from a BD-XL ODD during a restore operation. It was a piece of cake to handle these scenarios. I think with Acronis and many other Win-10 compatible imaging programs they also have boot media prep which the user can create a boot optical disc or USB flash drive. What I don't want are image back ups that are subscription services with ongoing paid subscriptions to remain activated. So I'll need to look into all of these matters before deciding.
Macrium can create rescue media as a bootable optical disk, a USB, an ISO file and a boot menu option. Boot from the rescue media and you can not only restore an image, it's the full Macrium software so it can also create an image of any machine, whether or not it has Macrium installed.
So basically just boot from the bootable rescue media and the Macrium program itself is running and can fetch back up image files stored on say the HDD of the system I'm working on (assuming the HDD is working totally fine and I just want to restore an image from a previous image back up), or perhaps fetch the image back files from another optical disc if the system has multiple ODDs? Hopefully the bootable rescue media does support UDF 2.5 so it can read BDs as a source of back up image files.
Turns out the new notebook I'm working on will only have UEFI mode so it means the HDD has to use GPT partitioning. Working on that now and reading up on DISKPART manual procedures. I did see some posts in the forum concerning that topic but also many other resources on line about this subject as well and might as well get the hang of the full manual DISKPART process.
Wow. And to think all this time I've just been creating a USB flash drive with Microsoft provided Media Creation Tool, booting the computer from it, answer a couple quick questions and be up and running on a clean install of Windows 10 within 1/2 hour. Who would have thought that I would need to buy a guide and go through a whole bunch of extra steps to create a super installation flash drive just to install Windows 10 on my own Personal Computer?
All that scare talk of not using an admin account because "... If you are signed in as an admin, the malicious code will inherit your right to do exactly what ever it wants!" and the site itself it not secure, being just HTTP:
Besides, in W10 even an admin is running processes as a standard user by default, so the malware would be caught by UAC.
I think I saw that reply briefly this morning from the other poster but it seems that the poster had deleted it. Had a super busy day and haven't had anytime to even read that reply. But my interest in using DISKPART manually is simply that - to master and feel confident about using it. I've been using lots of command line / command prompt interfaces for decades, it's not a big deal and feels very at home for me. Convenience isn't the point here but learning is.
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