Help needed - trying to create a recovery disc

Dollardog

The back up I did was to the backup partition of the same physical disc. I have just got a couple of external hard drives, which I got with the laptop, but haven't looked at them yet. Will also get another external drive though to back up onto. My idea was to backup my pc onto my laptop and the laptop onto my pc if that makes sense.

closed

Unless you have 2 partitions on each, you'll end up backing up the backups.

For XP or Vista, Disk imaging everything (see Donnie's links) to an external drive and a secondary backup of important data/pics/music to DVD is the safest method, and makes recovery easy.

If you have any maxtor or seagate drives internally or externally, maxblast is another disk imaging option.

Dollardog

My PC has 4 partitions, Boot (C), Backup (D), Recover (E) and Data (F). Don't know what this laptop has until I can get into it.

I've been given two external drives, but don't know how big they are, one is physically smaller than the other, think it might be for a laptop, it doesn't seem to say anything on it. The other says Mobile Storage Solution 3.5 External enclosure.

Could I connect them to my pc to find out how big they are?

Dollardog

Just found an answer to that one - no...can't connect them to my PC because I don't have the right cable. lol

closed

Try the local pound shop.

The key thing is backing up externally (twice!), if a hard disk fails, all the partitions may be unreadable, and disk imaging lets you boot from a CD and restore a working system easily.

Dollardog

Yes, I want to back up the whole disc to something, that's why I was hoping to back my pc onto the laptop, if its got a big enough hard drive. Don't intend to put anything on the laptop that won't be on the PC anyway.

I might see if I can get another hard drive as well. Can't get to look at these I've been given, to see how big they are.

Dollardog

I went in Poundworld yesterday to get one of those Bluetooth Dongles, in case this laptop hasn't got wi-fi, so the PC and laptop could talk to one another.

I saw some USB cables, but don't know if they were the correct ones as I didn't take any notice of them. I've got two cables with the thin looking USB connectors, but these drives have like square USB plugs.

Dollardog

This download is taking an age, its still got nearly two hours to go. Will it fit on one disc or will it take several?

Its a DVD RW I am going to burn it onto.

closed

It should fit on one CD

most pound shops sell a blister pack with every type of usb connector inside.

Bluetooth isn't really much use for connecting pc's together, you can setup file sharing using a router if you want to transfer from a to b

Dollardog

I just looked, its 542MB. I hope it works after all this!!