windows 7 recovery help please

excell

I have a disc labelled 'windows 7 recovery disc' that I created a year or two ago. I understand I need to backup my pics and stuff but what can I expect when I run the disc?
Please if someone would be kind enough to give me a step by step guide on recovering my system back to health I would really appreciate it.
Many thanx in advance
ps.... I'm a bit cuckoo when it comes to techy stuff so if you could explain any jargon bits... ta.

Johnny_B_good

If it's anything like the recovery disk that cam with my HP desktop then it should be relatively straight forward. I just inserted the disk and re-booted my PC. You have to ensure that the PC boots from the CD ROM, not the hard drive, otherwise your computer will just keep booting straight into windows again. For this you might need to have to go into the PC's BIOS before it boots up by pressing F5 or F8 at the start. Select 'boot options' and then select 'boot from CD'

All you have to do then is follow the on screen instructions.

excell

Thanks for that. Do I format the disc at all?

excell

My system came from dell pre loaded with some programmes such as word and excel and various others will they be on the recovery disc too?

macman

If you format it, you'll no longer have a recovery disk! Keep it safe and hope you never need to use it.
In the meantime, sort out your backup without delay. A recovery disk will not necessarily save your data. It's designed to recover the OS.
If you have MS Office then you should have received an install disk with it, the most important component is the licence key which is on the case or sleeve.

punksluck

Everything that came with the computer originally should be on the back up disk. If not then they should have supplied you with a separate disk. For now, try booting from the CD disk and then see what install options appear. It might be a case of installing windows and added software all-in-one, or it might be a case of installing them 1 at a time.

closed

It's much easier to use the factory restore partition - (Dell datasafe, restore your entire system to factory state)

If you want to be safe, do a disk image (not clone) backup of the whole system with macrium reflect free to an external drive first, and create the macrium boot cd. and copy your data to a few dvd's as well.

What's wrong with the machine?

Paulingreenwich

Just be careful. My last system restore went horribly wrong and I lost everything. Doing what the above post says might be much safer.

macman

Paulingreenwich wrote: »

Just be careful. My last system restore went horribly wrong and I lost everything. Doing what the above post says might be much safer.

But what was suggested was a Factory Restore, which erases all your data anyway. Different to a System Restore, which is (or should be) reversible.

excell

This is all a bit confusing?
What I'm trying to do is get my system back up to its original speed. Not really sure what I need to do in order to do this. What does a system partition do? I would just like to strip back all the nonsense that's found its way onto my system. When I got the PC from dell they got me to burn off a couple of discs but what's on them I dunno? I have a disc from Dell that says its for reinstalling drivers and utilities already installed. The disc they got me to burn are windows 7 recovery discs 1 & 2

battleborn

I always back up all my data to a cloud service, just incase the Hard drive dies.