HP question for anybody that can answer it.

Okay, so I have an HP PC that I bought used about a year ago or so. It came from the store pre-loaded with Vista Home Premium and the Factory Recovery Partition that can be accessed at the beginning of the boot process by pressing F11. Works fine, no problems with it or anything like that. I have kind of a specific question and Google isn't giving me what I'm looking for.

My question is can I create an image of the entire disk including the factory recovery partition with a program like Acronis True Image or something similar to that (open source suggestions are welcome), put it on an external HD somewhere to save for later in case I want to restore the machine back to factory condition later and sell it, wipe the drive entirely and reformat the partitions, install a different OS (specifically Windows Server 2008), and later be able to use the F11 one button restore option if I want to?

Basically, can I wipe the HD, put a fresh OS on it, wipe it again, put the factory image with recovery partition back on the HD, and still have the F11 feature or does that go away if I wipe the drive?

 

If you want to create a restorable 'Acronis type' image of the machine in its factory state you will need to put the machine into that state first. So -

1. Take an image right now, before you change anything at all. You might not see why but you'll thank me for that later

2. Restore the machine to its factory state and take a second image.

3. Clear all partitions, repartition if necessary, and install your preferred OS.

btw, if you use a third party partitioning tool at 3 do NOT use it to format, only to create the partitions. Allow the OS install to do the formatting.

 

Okay, makes perfect sense. So just to be clear, if I put the machine back in its factory state and image that particular state will I still be able to use the F11 feature later on if I decide to restore from the image I took of the factory state?

 

Yes, the machine will be identical in every respect to how it was when the image was created.

 

Awesome, thank you.

 

I'll just caution that you want to make sure you use the option to image the entire disc which includes the master boot record (MBR) where the F11 instruction is stored. You do not want to use the option to select particular partitions to back up as this may miss the MBR.

 

You do of course also have the option simply to clear the existing OS partition and install a different OS in it. As long as you don't tamper with the partition table in any way (by moving or resizing anything), your MBR, recovery partition, and F11 function would not be affected. Dunno why I didn't suggest this in the first place :-o I would still advise imaging the current OS partition before doing so.