tjwoosta Posted December 22, 2013 Report Share Posted December 22, 2013 I bought a laptop that came pre-loaded with windows 8 and it did not come with a backup operating system disk like i'm used to. Im worried that if something were to happen to my hard drive I would be forced to purchase another copy of windows. Is there some way to use my current install to create a bootable .iso that I could put on a usb thumb drive or cdrom so that if my hd breaks down (or if I just feel like reformatting it at some point) I can just pop in the usb drive and install from that? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-pops- Posted December 22, 2013 Report Share Posted December 22, 2013 Many laptops have a copy of the operating system on a separate partition on the hard drive and you would have been prompted to make a copy of this at the earliest opportunity. Does your machine not have this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alan2273 Posted December 22, 2013 Report Share Posted December 22, 2013 If you do not have a recovery partition, then you will have to clone the hard drive to external media.Easus ToDO is a very easy program to use as it is Wizard driven, but you will have to buy the version to use the cloning feature.There is no need to worry about activation as all major brands now embed the activation key in the UEFI BIOS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tjwoosta Posted December 24, 2013 Author Report Share Posted December 24, 2013 Many laptops have a copy of the operating system on a separate partition on the hard drive and you would have been prompted to make a copy of this at the earliest opportunity. Does your machine not have this? I see 5 partitons in diskpart 1. "Recovery" 450MB 2. "System" 260MB 3. "Resered" 128MB 4. "Primary" 586GB 5. "Recovery" 9GB Ive never been prompted to make a copy of any of them as far as Im aware. Which one would be the operating system backup? Also what would be the best method to clone a partition to a usb in windows (without paying money)? Im a long time linux user, and Im familliar with dd, so I guess I could create a linux livecd and just dd the partition to the usb If I have to, but Id prefer to learn to do it from windows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tjwoosta Posted December 25, 2013 Author Report Share Posted December 25, 2013 Ok I figured it out, toshiba provided an oem application for creating bootable factory restore discs (or usb) using the recovery partition. Would have been nice if they prompted me about it when I first set windows up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alan2273 Posted December 25, 2013 Report Share Posted December 25, 2013 A couple of free Imaging programs.http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspxhttp://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/ If you use either of these programs, there is a small, (100 - 128mb), reserved partition that must be included in the image. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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