How To Backup XP Recovery + Judging HDD Health

The first thing I want to ask is does anyone know if it is possible to back up an XP recovery sector. I have an Advent Notebook and when bought it came without a copy of Windows on disc. Instead it is on a recovery partition. It uses Angel Recovery I think. I want to know if i can make a backup of this to DVD incase (touch wood) my HDD dies one day out of the blue. Someone told me yesterday that it may be possible.

The second question is this. I have got PC Wizard installed on my computer. It says my HDD health is at 80%, I have only had the computer for a few months but I do use it a lot, and with it being low on memory theres a lot of paging going on. Is this anything to worry about or is it maybe innacurate? I have enclosed a screenshot for you to see if needed.



Thanks.

 

Thanks M.A. Thats great.

But will it let me access the hidden sector of my HDD? I mean the bit which re-installs XP, I want to make a disk with just windows XP on nothing else, so if anything ever happens I will be able to reinstall it on a new HDD.

Ive noticed that I have a 40gb HDD, but only 33gb of it I can access, Im thinking that windows is on the other 7gb, but I cannot access it at all its totally hidden. Will this software allow me to back that just that 7gb up and put it on DVD untill I want to put it on another HDD. Or even use Recovery Angel to burn windows to disk.

Im sorry if the answer is still the same Ive just got a limited amount of computer knowledge. And this is well above me!

I dont think I explained what I meant proper the first time, hope its better this time.

Thanks

 

anyone?

Or does anyone know how I can make a recovery disk again using the recovery tool. I had one but it got damaged. It only lets you make one.

 

I've had mixed results with Acronis True Image.

The 7GB you can't access, that's the hidden/backup partition,
which would be used by the Angel recovery software.

Ghost will be able to take an image of both the hidden and active partitions on your drive.
Buy Ghost, image the laptops drive to an external disk and that's all you need to do.

 

I might just do that this week, Thanks.

Can anyone now reccomed anything reliable to warn me if my hard drive is hammered?

Preferably for free, if not then anything else.

 

hi wayne

if you have a maxtor, it already has SMART diagnostics built in,
but you may need to turn it on from within the bios.

others here, may know more about this type of stuff

 

Im sorry i dont know what a maxtor is!

I downloaded SeaTools from Seagate, as my HDD is one of theres. It wouldnt run the scans fully for some reason, saying `you have stopped the scan`

PC Wizard says my HDD health is 80% but dont know if its reliable or not.

Ive just heard horror stories of how you never know when your HDD will die. One minute its OK next minute its dead!