"Paul" wrote in message
...
R.H. Breener wrote:
I tried to burn a Recovery disk as per a popup. The DVD made one part
way, and stopped working - the tray opened. The program said to return
the disk to the drive and I did so. That was the end of the DVD drive. I
refused to open even with the Paperclip-in-hole move. I got several
errors so did a System Restore. That didn't help so decided to do a
System Recovery already, just to find MS (or Dell) removed that from W8
as well. There is no onboard image to do a System Recovery from. There
is no Recovery Image on this PC so I decided to return it for something
else or a refund if I can get it.

With no Backup Image - where was it trying to make a Recovery Disk to do
a System Recovery from? I will have to delete all the things on it by
hand now since there is no way to reinstall the OS and restore it to box
condition. Dell will get a free DVD disk in the locked drive.

My question is - why did MS remove the backup image or is that a Dell
decision? I really want to know.

Thanks again for all the help you all have been.

That might have been the prompt to burn a 200MB boot CD.

No, not Boot. It said something about a System Recovery and gave the choice
between the DVD drive (no size disk mentioned) or a Flash (thumb) Drive
w/size mentioned. For the System Recovery I used a Flash drive since the DVD
draw was still locked. I just followed the simple directions and went off
to do something else. When I came back it was finished but still couldn't
see the DVD drive. The drive was still locked.


Note that tablets and laptops are treated differently now.

Tablets come in ARM processor and Intel processor versions.
The Intel processor ones, are the ones to get. The ARM
is a dead end on Windows (uses Secure Boot). The ARM one
is more likely to end up as a door stop.
On tablets now, with Windows 8, they use "WIM Boot"
technique. Instead of conventional "OS installation",
it works similarly to a Linux LiveCD on USB stick. The
initial set of OS files stays inside "install.wim". The
computer boots, and decompresses files from "install.wim"
on the fly. When files are updated, an overlay file system
records the difference on the internal storage device (Flash memory).
This means less Flash memory is wasted, and a 32GB flash chip
is enough to run Windows.

A question for the tablet scenario would be, even if you
backed up the storage device, could you restore to it again ?
I'm guessing you can, but haven't seen any web page with
the details.

The laptop should have a larger storage device. Partitioning
options include MBR and GPT (even for disks less than 2TB
in size now, they use GPT). A laptop with GPT setup (becoming
more common), can have as many as five partitions. If I
owned such a hunk of junk, I'd have to do forensics on the
whole damn thing, to find 12GB worth of backup files. They're
probably in there somewhere.

ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOM... the sound of that going right over my head. :-)

And the user manuals on some of these units (like an MSI
laptop might be a single sheet of paper), you can't expect
uniform documentation quality. Some companies are a bit
better at docs, than others. Most of these docs are
non-technical "happy happy" docs, meant to deceive you
about the nature of what you bought. It's then harder to
get solid info on what lurks underneath (where is my
recovery partition???).

*******

When you go from Win8 to Win8.1, that can break the "Refresh"
and "Reset" features provided by Microsoft (not by Dell). It's
possible they've provided easier ways to fix this, as the
issue didn't seem to be addressed all that well a year
ago.

If you ask the average user here, how they "manage" their
computer, they'll tell you they use a "complete backup",
to get to the heart of the issue.

These so called "complete backups" people have - how the hell do they get
them installed on a crashed PC? I had a Norton complete backup Recovery
disk one time plus a Norton emergency Startup/Boot Disk. They were supposed
to return XP to box condition. Nope! I never could get the backedup
Recovery (OS) installed on the HP PC ... and the disk was made on that PC.
Directions were clear. No tech needed. It was money thrown down the
crapper. The SU disk worked but not the Recovery backup disk. The exact same
thing happened with the backup disks for my Vista desktop. The emergency
boot disk worked (burned from the PC itself) but the "complete backup" disk
did not. Like with XP, all I got was errors. Why wont the backup disks we
make on our PCs actually work and reinstall the OS? The disks that used to
come with PCs did. But the ones you make yourself now from your PC give
errors. A helpful booklet came with PCs too. I would love to get my
hands on a W7 or Vista disk and somehow install in on the next Laptop. I
don't care for the changes I see in W8.

If all the involved
companies are going to be stupid about this stuff,
there's nothing like a complete backup. The only place
I might have questions, is whether I understand the
tablet issues well enough, to have my ass covered.
For example, if you gave me an Android, I wouldn't
look on the backup issue with any enthusiasm, since
there are roadblocks to doing a good job. So tablets
and mobile devices, they make me nervous. With a
laptop or a desktop, I feel a bit more comfortable.
If I received a GPT-based laptop, well, it would
be forensic analysis time... I don't know if my
recovery partition is in there or not. It should be.

I just gave them a quick glance today because they would be of no use to me.



Paul