Creating A Custom Recovery Partition

So, I've got this crappy old HP laptop. I know the best route to go is probably to create a DVD (or two or three) image clone of my hard drive and restore that way... thing about that is, my (detachable) DVD drive's spindle flew apart a year or two ago. It was never worth a poop anyways. Always burning faulty audio discs. So! That being said, I'm planning on using Clonezilla and Clonezilla Backup to create my own personalized recovery partition by way of grub4dos boot menu.

I was wanting to know if anyone else has done something like this before. If there are other software alternatives that leave the original Windows boot menu intact and still be able to use F11 to boot into your own created recovery partition.

Here are a few links if anyone is interested in this sort of thing.

Using CloneZilla to Create a Custom Recovery Partition
http://everyday-tech.com/using-clonezilla-to-create-a-custom-image-recovery-partition/

Clonezilla Website with detailed instructions and Clonezilla Backup download link
http://www.rmprepusb.com/tutorials/clonezilla

 

Well, I gave up on Clonezilla Backup. I couldn't figure out how to prevent Grub4dos (the initial boot screen that loads) from loading each time I start my computer. I looked into a few free backup software options, which include EASEus Todo Backup and AMOEKI Backupper? I think it was called? HAH! Come to find out, Windows 7 has it's own backup image creation system built into the OS itself!

Once you get your system JUST how you like it, just go to Control Panel > System > Backup & Restore. Then click 'Create System Image' in the left hand corner. Takes a little while, about half an hour or so with 30gb, but you can create a separate partition using Windows parition manager... or better yet Minitool Partition Wizard 9 Free Edition (it's a million times faster and even boots to a WinPE to manage a system partition that's in use if it has to. Tons of options and an easy to use interface. Good at repairing USB flash drives as well!), create a system image on the recovery partition you've created, and then you can hide it with a free tool called Disk Manager. Problem solved! As long as it created a worthwhile copy. I'd recommend closing all open programs during the image creation process just to be on the safe side.

Looks like my custom recovery partition worries are over! Next time deliberately break my computer, I have a fresh copy of Windows with all the base software I need waiting to be restored.

arty:

 

I do that but put the backup on an external drive with the recovery bits on a DVD. Having a recovery partition on the systems drive does me no good if that drive fails.

 

i told you what i do in your "need kelp with Kodi/Buntu" thread

i would put the image on an external drive, or even a big usb flash drive (16GiB .. or even 8 depending on how big root is). you can make an image of the root partition with the unix 'dd' program ... you can't write the image to the same partition that you're making the image from because the growing image file will be part of the image itself, so you'll have to put it somewhere else. i usually put it on home, then tar it with a few other related files and compress, then burn to disc ...

you could make a seperate partition and mount it at /mnt/backup or something, but like tw mentioned you'll be shit out of luck if the drive fails. its a lot less likely that two seperate discs will fail at the same time. optical discs should last decades or longer if stored properly.

when making an image, you need to make the image when the filesystem isn't online, since making an image isn't atomic (you don't want the filesystem being written to while you're creating the image). so boot from a live usb linux distro to do that. doing it with an online filesystem might cause problems with it, although those problems will probably be better than the problems you have that cause you to need the image.

if you use btrfs filesystem for root, you can create snapshots of the filesystem. since it doesn't actually copy data, and just the current state of the filesystem making them is extremely fast, and the snapshots don't take up very much space at all. iirc, you can do something similar with ext4, but i don't think its actually part of the filesystem design itself. btrfs snapshots can be created/restored instantly in an online state.

for /home you can just use tar .. putting the backup of home on a partiton on the same drive is pointless because the only reason you would have any problems with home is if the drive failed (unless you made the whole system on partition for some reason)
... or did something regretful such as dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

 

I put a hold on tinkering with Linux distributions for now. I'm back to Windows for the time being. I was trying to edit Clonezilla Backup, but the files it uses and the version of Grub4dos it uses prevents certain command lines from being utilized.

What I did was created a recovery partition on my main hard drive (D:\ [Recovery]), created a system image (in real-time without having to exit windows to a Recovery Environment/boot screen, also known as a 'hot image') on D:\ and copied the image folder to an external hard drive for safe keeping.

At first, I couldn't figure out how to restore the image (as I had been downloading and tinkering and wanted a nice clean workspace again lol). Upon entering Windows Backup and Restore and attempting to restore the image I had created, I received an error stating that 'Windows could not load the recovery environment/WinRE' So my solution was to pop in my Windows installer/recovery stick. I hit 'Repair Windows' and there it was! (Though my recovery partition was marked as E:\ I guess counting the 100mb partition in front of my drive) I just clicked next and Windows restored itself without any hassle. Of course it took about an hour or so, but that beats the hell out of a complete reinstall and waiting 3 days for updates to complete.

I was surprised, since Backup and Restore creates an image of your entire hard drive, that it recovered completely. I thought for sure it would get stuck once it got to attempting to restore the D:\ drive. I had no problems though.

I have an Ubuntu image waiting to be installed, but I just need to find the time to install it and get to modifying. Linux is a lot of work!

 

i have a hint to drop here about partition images ....

zeroing out the free space on the partition makes the image compress to a much smaller size. I was able to get the 16GiB root filesystem partition to compress to only 2.3GiB using bzip2 compression. This is half the compressed size of what it was before writing zeros to the 'empty' space (it was 5.6GiB before).

this makes the difference between being able to fit on a single layer DVD or not and requiring a bluray disc (or DVD-DL disc) which cost a little more. the reason this works is that truly empty blocks containing nothing but zeros compress extremely well. unless the drive is brand new, the free space isn't all zeros, and instead those blocks contain whatever was there before you deleted it, or reformatted.

i've had to use them before, i was really glad i had the image.

 

Nice to know! I've been using O&O Defrag which has an option to wipe free space. Not sure if it writes free space with zeros or not though. Any recommendations for Windows by chance?

 

recommendations ... boot a linux distro from usb disk, mount the partition and run dd from /dev/zero on it you could write a small program also that creates a file, and write zeros too it until the disk runs out of free space, at that point its wiped.

ccleaner for windows im pretty sure does this, and iirc its still free. wiping with pseudorandom patterns is better against data recovery methods (theoretically, i think any kind of wiping is difficult to impossible to do in the real world), but if our goal is to be able to compress the free space very efficiently, then this would actually make it worse because pseudorandom data doesn't compress well, hence why i suggested wiping with zeros (or 0xFF, 0x42 ... w/e as long as its pattern with extrememly low entropy )

 

if your looking for something that is easy to set up, i use grub4dos on an external hard drive and boot up Acronis rescue media, on the same external drive i have various acronis images.

i recently cloned like 20 laptops in under 2 hours using this method, its really fast and super duper easy, you only need 2 programs.

 

Well... I just spent about 3 hours creating recovery partitions and realized the method I had in mind was flawed.

I'm using EaseUS ToDo Backup on Win7. I did some research with Win8 and UEFI, Secure Boot, and GPT format partitions. What I'm trying to do is create a recovery partition that will stay intact (on drive D:\) if I choose to go back to Win8. The only way I see to preserve the disk's format is to create a complete disk partition. If I perform a system recovery though, the recovery drive (D:\) will be deleted. So, basically, I can't store a complete disk backup on the local disk that is being restored.

Also, if I choose to restore Win8 (which is a complete disk backup because of GPT disk format and secure boot), that will erase the D drive with the Windows 7 backup.

So I guess my only option is to either create a backup of C:\ and the system drive and store it on D:\ and forget Windows 8 forever.
Which seems to be the easier option...

Or be forced to store it on an external drive.

Unfortunately, with a complete disk backup, you can't choose the partitions you want to restore. Which is where my problem resides.

What a headache. I guess I'll have to research a bit more on secure boot to get the result I'm trying to acheive.

If I can disable secure boot and format Win8 to MBR/NTFS (without data loss) I could simply create partition only backups for Win7 and Win8 on a single recovery partition, eliminating all this mess I've got my head wrapped around.