What are my restore discs use for?

[adu123]

I brought my vista home premium a year ago, at the time of purchase I also paid them to make the restore/recovery discs just in case for reformatting in the future. Well, yesterday, I reformated my computer without even using those discs I had order, just by pressing F11(system recovery) at the startup... and everything went smooth.

If I could just reformat in the system, then what are those discs for? I'm kinda confuse, can someone answer that?

 

[Tmagic650]

Yes... If your hard drive physically fails wipeing out all your data, you can use the paid for Restore discs to copy the Operating System and programs to your new hard drive, as it was when you first bought the computer

 

[brucethetech]

Yes... If your hard drive physically fails wipeing out all your data, you can use the paid for Restore discs to copy the Operating System and programs to your new hard drive, as it was when you first bought the computer

right on! and they double as drink coasters until you need them for the restore.

 

[adu123]

Yes... If your hard drive physically fails wipeing out all your data, you can use the paid for Restore discs to copy the Operating System and programs to your new hard drive, as it was when you first bought the computer

Does that mean unless my hard drive is dead(how do I know that?), I can just reformat in the system?

btw, what will happen if I still want to use those restore to reformat my computer even if my hard drive is fine?

thx for your response.

 

[LookinAround]

Hi adu123!

The system manufacturer's create a partition on your hard drive and they install the recovery software onto it. That's the partition you boot into by clicking F11 on powerup.

The "recovery partition on disk" method works just great unless the problem you have is the hard drive itself has failed. (in which case you can't reach ANYTHING on your disk!) That's when you discover you're very happy to have the recovery CDs to reinstall and/or repair Windows

 

[adu123]

Hi LookingAround

Is it possible that the malwares could sneak into the partition and mess it up?

 

[LookinAround]

To my knowledge, the recovery partition is read-only and can not be infested. I've never heard of losing recovery partition from malware. Rather,
> Hard drive crashes (so you lose everything on the drive) or
> Sometimes people don't realize and delete the partition

Another method to protect yourself is by creating a "clone" image of your entire hard drive. (freeware tool Easus disk-copy or i, personally, found it well worth the $50USD to buy a commercail cloning/backup product like Acronis True Image). Acronis will not only create a disk image (you can simply restore to a new disk) but also lets you selectively view/restore files and folders

 

[adu123]

thx for the response, now I don't need to worry about it lol