Creating Win7 Recovery Disk

I have two PCs (Lenovo Desktop, Lenovo Tower) which share the keyboard, mouse and display screen through a 4 Way switch (the other two are my old XP machines).
Today I decided (after a Win7 fiasco on my wife's Toshiba Win7 machine) to create a Win7 recovery disk.

I proceeded as indicated on my Control Panel and successfully created a Recovery CD for PC#1
I switched to other machine PC#2 and followed the same steps.
I got this error message - System Repair Disc Could Not Be Created The parameter is incorrect (0x80070057).

What can I do now?
If I need it, can I use the System Recover Disc that I created on PC#1 on PC#2?

Thanks for any help.

 

Save yourself a lot of heartache and learn how to image your system.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/macrium_reflect_free_edition.html

 

Thanks guys. I downloaded and installed the free edition of Reflect.

My internal hard drive (C is 223 Gb (currently 213 Gb Used). Will I need about 250 Gb of space on a local hard drive (USB attached) to store the image of my system or just 30 Gb the size of the Windows folder?

Also, the disaster that occurred to my wife's PC was a corruption (probably during an Up-Date) of the Windows code and it couldn't even boot. Would this Reflect View be of any use in a case like this?

 

Reflect compresses the image file so, no you wouldn't need 200+GB on your external, or anything approaching it providing most of the files have not already been compressed. If you take a look at the blurb on the download site it tells you what it does, and in the case of your wife's machine it would have been able to restore the system to exactly how it was when the image was created had you created an image before the problem occurred. It can't though perform magic and restore it where no previous image exists. Sorry if I raised your hopes on this. Microsoft used to offer a free download of the Windows 7 system recovery disc but not any longer. There are though paid for third party versions available.

 

You've got less than 10% free space on this drive. You need to get stuff off of it to increase the free space to at least 25% or your looking for possible failure of the drive.

 

Macrium Reflect and Paragon Home Free both will make a boot cd/iso for usb boot that each have a 'fix boot' section or option. I have used these before with success. You have the Reflect already. Make the cd. If it doesn't help in this case, it may later on sometime

 

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions.

mdonah - Yes, I intended to do that. I try to keep that unused to around 40%. Right now it has a lot of DVD files (about 5Gb each) that I'm either going to delete or move to a high capacity USB attached hard drive.

I may have been a bit misleading about my wife's PC. After a lot of messing about with it, I did a re-format and loaded the factory Win7 that was on the hard drive. But I think the real problem is an intermittent hardware failure, so I'm replacing her laptop with a re-conditioned Dell laptop that has Win7 loaded after failing to install a Chromebook for her. Discussed that in this earlier thread http://tinyurl.com/yaunagtp

The whole mess got me to thinking about recovery which is the reason for this thread.

I really appreciate all of you helping me out with this and by mid week I should have this recovery approach taken care of and I'll be able to sleep. I've been using PCs since they first came out (1982 -DOS) and most of the Windows versions through Win7. In all those years I never had a failure (PC, hard drives, O/S), nor a virus, so I had become complacent.

 

Just get assurance that it boots into Windows without requesting any passwords

 

If it requires a password, more than likely the hint will read "password=password". But on my two Dell refurbs, Setup was at the point where I set up the Administrative account with my Username and my password.

 

We can bypass the login password on dell password . maybe you need to some tutorials

 

Thanks for all your comments. That Dell installed easily. No password problems. It installed the original factory Win7 (no updates) so I had to get all 185 or so up-dates installed to bring it up to current levels, including the very important WannaCry virus protection. The first thing I installed was Avast (free) virus protection and it held the WannaCry virus at bay until I could get the up-dates installed (a few hours).
This is my first experience with a Dell and I'm impressed. Very inexperienced (my wife) user friendly. No requests for help.

 

Any suggestions for Dell laptop password reset ?

 

There are several guides on the internet to this. Can you say what your specific issue is, the system model number and the OS installed. If you have a problem you need to solve it is probably best for you to start your own new thread as this thread is resolved.