M
mrslothbrok
Thread author
I need help understanding a few things, so please bear with me. Myself and my mom both have Dell Inspiron laptop computers with Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit, they both come with Dell DataSafe Local Backup. We have recovery media created for both of our computers by the DataSafe application, I've reset my computer to factory before with it and it seems to do well. She had to have her hard drive replaced in 2011 because it was failing, so the repair man created media for her the same way. But after reading this article, and this one, it seems that this "recovery" media won't do any good if the recovery partition that is hidden away becomes corrupted or if you have a total loss of the hard drive, because the recovery disk it asks you to create relies on the partition image on the hard drive to work.
So, what should I be doing to ensure that we have a proper disk image if in the event that our hard drives stop completely? I've seen Macrium Reflect Free, I tried it out on our desktop but I honestly haven't a clue as to what I am doing or what I'm supposed to do. Both of our computers are out of warranty so I don't know if the installation media from Dell will be free. We have two older backup drives, one by Clickfree that we got in 2010 and a Western Digital My Passport that has her school papers on it, but I don't know its age.
The problem here is, I don't know how to image our systems and put it on either hard drive, I don't even know if the Clickfree one will let me because as far as I know it only allows it to search for files. Could I just image the necessary partitions for Windows to run and the recovery partition that is hidden and do it that way?
So, what should I be doing to ensure that we have a proper disk image if in the event that our hard drives stop completely? I've seen Macrium Reflect Free, I tried it out on our desktop but I honestly haven't a clue as to what I am doing or what I'm supposed to do. Both of our computers are out of warranty so I don't know if the installation media from Dell will be free. We have two older backup drives, one by Clickfree that we got in 2010 and a Western Digital My Passport that has her school papers on it, but I don't know its age.
The problem here is, I don't know how to image our systems and put it on either hard drive, I don't even know if the Clickfree one will let me because as far as I know it only allows it to search for files. Could I just image the necessary partitions for Windows to run and the recovery partition that is hidden and do it that way?
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