I'm not that good with these kind of things so plz bear with me. Well, I need to reformat a laptop, but i have no windows xp cd to do this. My computer has its own recovery partition that is basicly a back up and can restore my computer to its original condition. Is it possible to burn this partition onto a disc and then use it to reformat my laptop? All help appreciated, and I'm sorry if any of this violates any rules.
what you need is a disk imaging program that can backup an entire partition "bit by bit". You would save the image onto an external drive. After you reformat your hard drive you would just reload the image back to the hard drive. Theres true image, ghost, and paragon drive backup. With paragon being the cheapest of the bunch. Also there is a free program "partitionlogic" that can backup hard drive partitions but is very limited in what it can do. I use true image to backup and recover my hard drives and it has worked for me. I'm including the link to there forums so you can get an idea on how to backup and recover your hard drives and the problems you might encounter. All partition backup software work about the same, so the information you find in that forum will be useful. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65 free partition backup http://partitionlogic.org.uk/
so can i just save my back up partition with partition logic onto another hard drive, reformat my laptop, and then reload the back up onto my laptop? if so, can i save it onto a disk instead of an external hard drive because i don't have any big enough to hold the partition.
