Dear Computer Lady,
Can you tell me is there anyway the recovery partition can be extracted from a hard-drive and put on dvd or flash drive for later use?
Thank You, Gary
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Dear Gary,
Most computers these days don’t come with CDs or DVDs that you can use to install Windows and all your programs in the event of a crash, virus infection, or even hard drive failure.
They do, however come with a recovery partition on the hard drive (a partition is just a section of the hard drive that shows up as a separate drive letter in the computer) Some companies even hide the recovery partition so that it doesn’t show up in Windows.
That recover partition will work great if you get infected with a virus, or Windows crashes, but what can you do if your hard drive fails, or you want to replace your old hard drive with a new, larger one?
Fortunately, the answer is already built into your computer.
All the major computer manufacturers ship their computers with both a recovery partition and a program that you can use ONE TIME to create your own set of recovery disks.
While each manufacturer does this a little differently, it should be fairly easy to find the program by clicking on the Start Orb and typing the word, “Recovery” in the search box.
You should see an item in the start menu that says something like “Recovery Disk creation”. The wording will be different for some computers.
To create the disks, you will usually need anywhere from three to six blank DVD-R disks, or a flash drive large enough to hold all your files.
I would suggest using disks, since they have a much longer shelf life than a flash drive.
Elizabeth
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