Best way to create System restore partition- win 7?

[edm]

There was a System restore partition on the hard-drive of my PC, but I've since upgraded to an SSD so the recovery partition was removed.

What I want to do is get everything installed on the PC that I need... Drivers, Updates, Win7, Office, etc....to have a working system. I then want to create an image on a separate partition that can be extracted onto the C: drive to restore it back to it's original state if needed.

Similar to the factory reset option used on HP laptops

Would the built in "create a system image" in win 7 suffice, or would is it better to use 3rd party software (free preferred)?

Thanks

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Most would tell you to use third party---Macrium Reflect Free Edition being a popular choice.

The built-in Windows tool works, but it's not particular flexible and can be confusing. It's just cranky.

I certainly would NOT "create an image on a separate partition". Put it on another drive entirely--internal or external. If you save the image on a separate partition on the same drive as C, it would be lost in case of a drive failure. Not good.

You'll need to make a restore/recovery boot CD or USB stick. Do that within the imaging tool. Confirm that it will in fact boot the PC. If it won't, you can't restore and are dead in the water.

You need to image C and also any other partition shown as "system" in Windows Disk Management. In a typical Win 7 system, that would mean imaging both C and "System Reserved". The latter partition contains necessary boot files. If you have an OEM PC, the OEM may have placed the boot files on some other partition--that partition would be shown as "system" in Windows Disk Management. You can make one image file containing all necessary partitions or you can make separate image files of each necessary partition.

It's a good idea to practice the restoration process to familiarize yourself with the procedure and menu choices, rather than wondering about that when you're actually trying to recover from some disaster.

 

[edm]

Thanks for the detailed reply! I'll give Macrium a try. Your help is appreciated.