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Creating Recovery Disks

by Wren McMains
(8/11/2013)

Very Important

New machines use to come with two or three DVDs. One from Microsoft with an official copy of Windows so you can re-install it if (when) something happens to your hard drive. One with all the drivers and any other special software needed for the particular machine. And maybe one that allows you to restore the machine exactly like it was when shipped. This machine came with NONE.

If your machine is like this it is very important to use whatever tools they supply to burn all the appropriate disks. You need to be sure you have a bootable DVD and everything you need to restore your machine. The problem is that it's not always obvious what this is.

This ASUS is the first machine that I've seen that came with neither discs or a program that allowed you to create them. I looked at the manual that came with machine (electronic, PDF version only) and it said that "some" ASUS machines were shipped with a program to create recovery media, but I discovered the machines pre-loaded with Windows 8 don't have the program. (The program shown in the Table of Contents is the one used to create recovery media on an ACER machine.)

The recovery program is on a hidden partition on the internal drive. My advice is to use a backup program (like Paragon Hard Disc Manager) that makes an image of your entire drive. That way should something happen to your drive you can restore it, including all the programs you just loaded. This will also restore the recovery program in the hidden partition should you want to restore it to the way it was originally shipped.

Another option I found via Google (which requires a 16 GB USB Flash drive which can't be used for anything else) is to: 1) Go to the Windows 8 start screen. 2) type "drive recovery" in search screen - choose settings tab in search screen. 3) click on "create a recovery drive". 4) Insert your 16GB drive it will create a bootable USB drive with the recovery media.

My advice is to create an image backup of your drive every 6 months or so ... you can keep the 2 or 3 most recent ones on an external hard drive along with MUCH MORE FREQUENT backup of all your data. See: Backing up your data with SyncToy.

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