ok i have an HP dv7 3165 and has a D: recovery partition, if i just do a back up on the C:\ and do a recovery is it going to wipe the whole hard drive and i will loose my partition. or will it just clear out the c:\ and just overwrite that. thank you.
It will just clear out and restore the C drive, any other partitions will be untouched.
Dave
thanks for the quick answer, so pretty much if my hdd fails then i will loose my partition b/c that is part of the same drive right? thank u.
Correct. If your hard drive fails you loose everything on that drive and very few laptops have more than one drive.
If your image was kept "outside" the laptop, say on a external USB drive, then you could restore that image onto a new drive.
However, if you only backed up the C drive then that is all you'll get back.
But I wouldn't be too concerned about the recovery partition if you have an image made.
Restoring the image will restore your system to how it was when you made the image. Using the recovery partition will recover the system back to when it was when you got it and all your data will be gone and all that junk and trial programs you spent hours removing will be back.
Dave
thanks for the help, i am sorry with all the ?'s i am new at imaging, so can i save the recovery partion to another harddrive/USB drive if so how so if i need it later, or should i back that up as seperate or same image, so if i do restore will it restore the recovery back to my orignal drive too or will it fail b/c its looking for a new drive?, also if a drive does fail can i install a new hard drive then restore image to that new hard drive, thank you.
Sure, you can image the recovery partition if you want. You would only need to image it once since it doesn't ever change.
I would make it a seperate image, I like to have seperate images for each partition.
You also didn't say what version of windows your using. If it's windows 7 you may also have a hidden system reserved partition (SRP) at the beginning of the drive.
If you ever need to restore an image on your existing drive, like I said it will just restore that partition and not touch any of the others. So you can restore any partition in any order you want.
On a new hard drive since it does not have partitions you have to restore them in order from first to last.
SRP if being used, then the C drive, then the recovery partition if you want it back.
As for your last question, yes if your drive fails you can restore the images onto a new drive providing the images are kept somewhere else and were not on the hard drive that failed. It's always best to keep a current image "outside" the system.
I image my main partition onto another drive and then regulary copy the most recent image onto an external USB drive.
About a month ago my wife's HP laptop had a hard drive failure and it died.
I was using another, older image program on her system because I'm cheep and it didn't have too much important stuff on it.
I would image it once every 2 weeks or so and then every month copy an image over the network to our desktop.
I went and got a new laptop hard drive, installed it and then restored the images onto it.
Took me about an hour to get everything back up and running, would have taken me a week to get everything re-installed and setup the way it was.
The image was about 3 weeks old but she didn't loose anything important, and she knows that beween images if she has anything important to copy it over the network to the desktop and vice-versa.
Dave