SC Tom wrote:
I recently bought a new Acer Aspire V3 laptop that came with the Win7
64-bit setup partition. I ran it, installed Win7, cleaned all the crap
off I didn't want/need, and installed some of the programs I wanted on
it (still more to go- that's an ongoing thing, IYKWIM). After I got
things the way I wanted, I booted from my ATI CD to create an image of
the whole drive, including the hidden "PQService" recovery partition,
the 100MB "System Reserved" one, and of course, my C: partition.
The question I have is, if I just created an image of the C: partition
without the other two partitions, and restored the C: to a new drive, is
that new drive going to boot on its own, or do you think I'll have to
run Startup Repair to do it? In Disk Management, the System Reserved
partition just says "Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)",
whereas my C: says "Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary
Partition)". That leads me to believe that C: will boot on its own, but
just thought I'd ask the opinion of others here.
I haven't tried deleting the 100MB partition as per the instructions he
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=409
since 100MB one way or the other is not really taking a bite out of my
500GB drive. If I get to the point where I need that 100MB, I think
it'll be time for a new, larger drive :-)
TIA!
That's exactly the situation with my last two Acer desktops.
My recovery partition is 100% free; the system reserved 70% free. That
means that it takes the blink of an eye to back them both up. So what I
do each month or so is take a system image of the whole drive. I have
1TB C, 1TB D (which I hardly ever use, preferring to keep all my music
and such on an external disk. The image contains all four partitions.
I do this for the possibility of total disk replacement. In that case
the procedure would be;
1. Replace HD.
2. Restore from last image.
You could, of course, use your plan B; backup just C. And then in the
case of total disk replacement you'd just have to add Start-up Repair as
item 3. But that might not create the Acer-style system reserved;
probably won't. And that makes me wary because maybe some Acer utilities
need that.
Hence my tactic of putting it on the backup.
Ed