Posted on 06/26/2023 2:04:28 PM PDT by Paul R.
As a separate question arising from my last "article" / question, I am about to make a recovery drive for a refurbished Dell desktop machine I purchased recently. (Dell Precision Tower 3420 - a fairly impressive little machine considering I got it in great condition for under $80 including shipping.)
When I read about recovery drives, often it is stated they can be used to restore the machine to its "factory" state, software-wise, should one run into a software problem, corrupted drive, etc., not otherwise resolvable. But... This machine likely originally had WIN 7 Pro on it and then was upgraded to Win 10 Pro, which is what runs it now.* I under no circumstance would want to go back to "7" on this machine. Much less then see if it's even possible to "re-upgrade" to "10", once recovered.
So... What gives? If I make a recovery drive NOW, will it recover the machine to Win 10 Pro if need be?
Have any FReepers gone through this?
Thanks!
I’ll be “out” for a while & will check back here this evening - thanks again, All!
The recovery drive is unrelated to a full install. The recovery drive just lets you boot up in a bare bones mode (safe mode) to make fixes. If you can make the fixes at that point, there’s no re-install of Windows anyway. If you can’t make the fixes, then there’s the issue of re-installing Windows, which means having the license. Assuming you have the license from the prior owner it would be Windows 7.
Sorry. I confused Recovery Drive with Emergency Boot Disk. The EBD is the one that lets you boot up in safe mode. The Recovery Drive is the full reboot in the latest Windows (Windows 10) and all of your registry settings (i.e. the settings each app records in Windows as your configuration for that app, etc.).
I would ask, why you want an older machine regardless of the cost. Before I did that, I would want to have a specific purpose for the machine versus buying it and then figuring it out.
Something I would consider, going from Win 7 to Win 10 or Win 11 which is now current is likely a rebuild versus an upgrade.
I would do a little googling and see what the minimum requirements are for Win 10 or 11, depending on what you decide.
Then I would see if the machine you are working has the memory and processor capable or running either OS. Memory is normally cheap and is the easiest to install and get immediate results.
Then I would serious consider what it would cost me to make the machine you are working on run either Win 10 or 11 and is it even worth it, compared to the cost of a new more modern machine.
Recovery drive is part of an OEM install aka custom windows version that large manufacturers create that includes hardware drivers specific to that machine + windows version, hence the factory reset aspect.
About all the individual has is a file backup for your docs and windows’ system restore to fix a broken system.
The Dell Recovery Disk, is exactly that, it is an image of what the machine was when it left the Dell factory; it will ONLY work on that specific disk.
Which means, that if you ghost that drive to another disk, the software will recognize that this is a different machine, and will not work. It will blow away the entirety of what was on the main partition (thereby fixing, or re-mapping the bad sectors by the reformat) any bad sectors. It will reload the image the disk had as it left he factory, so if you had a bunch of crapware (Earthlink, America Online, etc) when you first bought it, you will have it again.
Also, the free upgrade from Win7 to Win10 may or may not be currently available. I would hazard a GUESS that the base requirements for Win11 will be more than this Win7 hardware can manage.
My advice (take it or leave it, it’s your $$) is purchase an external USB SATA drive of ~1-2 TB and have Windows make a Restorable backup of your hard drive. That way, if your hard drive utterly dies on you (smoke, flames or simply refuses to spin up), you can restore your machine to the latest backup from that external drive, and not lose valuable data.
For what it’s worth, Sold State Hard Drives (SSD) are approximately 20+x faster than the old spinning drives, and far more reliable. Prices have dropped significantly.
There are others on this board more knowledgeable than I. Depending upon your level of skill, I would encourage considering some flavor of UNIX, the performance bump and similarities to Windows is remarkable.
Why no one mentions “Image back up”?
I agree.
As cheap as flash Memory is you could backup your entire disk to a flash drive.
Then boot from that if necessary
sorry you have a dell
Make a recovery disk now, and make one right after you upgrade the OS. And then you should also make a backup “IMAGE” of the OS drive for the easiest and safest restore in case of disaster.
You'll need a destination drive, possibly a USB portable hard drive or even a very large (this will be slow) thumb drive. Plug it in.
1. Go to search window (lower left). Type in "Backup".
2. Under "looking for an older backup?" click on "Go To Backup And Restore (Windows 7)"
3. Upper left side, click on "Create a system image"
4. Select "Change Settings" and then click on destination drive.
5. Click on "Backup now".
6. This is an image of your hard drive but it is not bootable. When the backup finishes, click on "Create a System Repair Disk"
7. Send this to a DVD - this will be what you boot from when you wish to do a restore and the hard drive is too corrupted to boot.
8. Disconnect the destination drive and store both it and the recovery DVD in a safe place.
Do not be dissuaded by the mention of Windows 7 above - this will backup and restore an image of whatever hard drive installation it sees.
If you do need to restore the system image, plug the backup drive back in, the DVD into the DVD drive, and boot from the DVD drive. This will bootstrap enough of a stub OS to run the restore application and copy the image from the backup drive to your main drive. THIS IS A DESTRUCTIVE OVERWRITE. What you get should be a bootable copy of your old hard drive in the state in which you backed it up. Hope this helps.
Well, it might be “Windows 7 upgraded to 10”. (Directly using the Microsoft upgrade software I would imagine.)
OTOH, it may be the HD was totally wiped and a fresh OS (Win 10 Pro) installed. I’ll check with the seller - their communication, at least B4 the sale, was good.
Anyway, you cleared up something for me: I thought the whole “recovery drive” bit was more than it is. Thanks for the enlightenment!
Obviously I need to make full images of the boot drives on all my computers. Yeesh. That’ll keep some electrons whirring about for a while...........
Ah, noted. Thanks - that makes more sense.
You can download the recovery image from Dell
Huh? This is the newest and fastest desktop I have, with a SATA 240 GB SSD and 8 GB of DDR4 RAM (I’ll upgrade to 16 or 24 GB.*) Only a 6th gen i-7 processor, so “by the book” Microsoft doesn’t guarantee Win 11 on it, but, its running Win 10 Pro quite nicely and fairly quickly. I’m in the process of upgrading to a 500 GB M.2 NVME UEFI boot drive (genesis of previous thread, as said upgrade is a bit more complicated than expected, then the SATA 240 GB SSD will become a data drive for now - later I’ll add a larger SATA data drive and the 240 GB drive will become a (primarily) downloads drive.
ALSO, this machine has both HDMI and (2) DP ports, and lots of USB 3 ports — perfect for me.
*Actually, the RAM upgrade would already be done but it appears I got a bad “stick”. (It’s exactly per Crucial’s scan / recommendation.)
No, this isn’t the latest “screamer” / gaming monster, but it’s more than sufficient to be my primary office machine for a year or two, at which point I can likely nab a Win 11 Pro or at least a Win 11 Pro capable machine for under $100.
Thanks, that’s the most complete and concise explanation I’ve seen.
Although THIS computer does have a DVD drive, many these days do not. So, I assume the “System Repair Disk” can be on a flash drive or even on a data disk if one has two internal hard drives?
Purchase a copy of NTI Backup or similar type backup software. Run a complete system backup to an external drive and make a boot thumb drive. You can recover your entire system with all your files. Should run a complete system backup every month or more often depending on need.
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