Making Recovery Drive Question

Hi , I'm gonna makea recovery drive for Windows 8.1 Do I need to unplug my other external usb drive or will it ask me which drive I want to use first? i assume it will, but it's not mentioned in teh instructions. Obviously I wouldn't want to accidentally erase the 2.1 TB I just backed up to my new external drive!

And does anyone have a rough estimate of how long it takes to make a recovery drive? Hopefully a lot less time than a defrag??

Thanks.

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...ry-drive-460091d5-1e8f-cb33-2d17-8fdef77412d5

 

Hardly anyone uses the MS recovery drive these days and use third party imaging software instead, hence the lack of replies I guess. With a system image you can restore your computer to exactly the state it was in when the image was created and this works brilliantly provided your system was in clean condition when the image was created. However in your case there are known system faults so maybe not such a good idea right now. The tool you need to correct the system errors you already know about, and any others, is DISM. Once you have run that you should be able to run sfc /scannow without errors and can then go on create a new system image rather than a recovery drive.. This is the method plodr is referring to.

For many years I've been using the free version of Macrium Reflect for system imaging and would swear by it but there are others too.

 

Hi, I know what files are broken because I use the SFCUtility recommended here on majorgeeks. Do you think the DSIM will do any better? i assume if it doesn I won't have to worry about getting locked out when it restarts. :/
Thanks.

 

When SFC finds corrupted system files but says it can't fix them, DISM is the MS fix for this. It works - try it.

 

Run DISM and then the SFC Utility.

 

All right I will. relieved to know that. Thought SFCUtitlity did same thing. Thanks.
the system imaging- Is that done via CD or either CD or USB drive?
Thanks.

 

To create a system image you install Macrium Reflect Free or an alternative and follow the screen instructions under Backup. The program creates a compressed file on your chosen backup drive, normally a USB drive. The image file is typically about half the size of the used bit of your system drive, normally C:

To restore an image you first need to create recovery media, usually on DVD, and boot to it.

I'll leave it to Eldon to explain what the SFC utility can and can't do as he created it.

 

My Dvd burner doesn't work. I can only make CD's. Is 32GB usb drive big enough? That's what I got.

 

What I should ahve said was, the software i was using to burn DVd's doesn't work. I can still play & rip DVD's. I don't know if those operations all use different lasers but I'm guessing you can probably tell me that.

 

The recovery media can be on DVD or USB flash drive. I use an 8Gb flash and your computer needs to be able to boot to USB. Any external drive or network drive will do to hold your image files, just make sure it has plenty of space available - say 100Gb. Other files on the disk are unaffected.

 

You jsut said you use an 8GB drive & tehn you said I needed 100GB . ?? And how do I know if my computer can boot to USB??

 

The 8Gb flash drive is needed to boot your computer into on offline version of Macrium Reflect. From there, with your backup drive plugged in, you can navigate to where your image was previously stored and restore the image to your computer. To prove you can boot to usb, first install Macrium and use the menu to create your rescue media on your flash drive. Then try booting to the flash drive.

 

Tried to run teh DISM. Got an error 87 Are there supposed to be spaces before teh slashes???

 

OK I got it running

 

dism failed.
Can i stil make a recovery drive? It's better to have afew broken files than none at all, isn't it??

 

You really do need to get DISM to work in order to get your system files back in good shape. The best thread that I can find on this is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/an...-files-not-found-running-dism-restorehea.html

Clearly though there aren't any simple solutions. Study the thread and see if it helps. If no joy then you may have to reinstall.