I read the great critiques of free drive imaging programs, and have pretty well narrowed my choice down to Paragon DBE
(because I'm running Vista Home Premium 64-bit --- not too many free ones support 64-bit yet, and because I have no internet connection at home, I can't even try Macrium since it needs to activate by an online connection.)
My almost-new Dell Studio 1537 laptop has a System Recovery partition, and came with dvds "For Reinstallation of Vista HP 64-bit", "For Reinstallation of Drivers & Utilities", and a couple of application installation disks.
I want to un-install some of the OEM-preloaded applications, and install my own anti-virus, office suite, etc. Then create an image that I can use for any future disaster recovery.
Before I download and install and maybe waste my time, I'd like to know ---
how does the "recovery disk" part work? I'm assuming the recovery disk is needed to boot up the computer to begin the image restore process.
Does the Express version creation wizard handle everything to build the recovery disk, or do I need to download anything?
I read on the Paragon site that the Recovery Disk was only available for pay versions. Kind of hard to find more information about the bootable recovery disk.
(edited quotes from Paragon Knowledge Base
Quote:
Our Bootable Recovery/Copy CD is a special add-on developed as an alternative for Windows environment. It provides some opportunities when one can't use our software under Windows for certain reasons. All functions of our software products under Windows can be found on Recovery CD and even more:
........Recovery CD includes Paragon Linux and Paragon DOS. You can read about their differences in the manual. In general, we recommend you to use Linux as it has more capabilities.
......We recommend you to download the Recovery CD image, burn it and store away to be on the safe side.
Q: How to create bootable Recovery CD?
......Download a self-burning archive with an image of Recovery CD from update page for the product (usually you can get there by 'Help' -> 'About' -> 'Download Update')
.......Please note: Update section is available only for users who possess full commercial version of the product. Trial and demo versions usually don't have Recovery CD as a unit.....
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If I have totally misunderstood the restore/recovery process, please forgive, and tell me the correct information.
Thanks for any advice.