C.M. Burns said:
Subject: How to create Windows 7 installation disc?
System: Acer Aspire w/ Windows 7 preinstalled
I just bought an Acer Aspire desktop PC that came with
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit preinstalled on the hard
drive; however, there is no installation DVD.
If my hard drive fails, how can I reinstall Windows on
another drive? Is there a way to make a bootable
installation DVD?
TIA.
There are two kinds of devices, laptops and "netbooks".
I have an Acer laptop. It was given to me at the
end of last year.
The laptop has two things you're supposed to do when
you get the unit.
1) Acer provides a recovery partition on the hard drive.
And includes an application to burn 3 DVD images, plus
a "drivers" DVD. The 3 DVD images would correspond to
Windows 7. There are lots of files with extension .swm
on those discs. And I haven't looked at the "drivers"
DVD yet, to see what is on there. So that is a total
of 4 DVDs.
2) Microsoft offers a menu item in Windows 7, to burn a
fifth disc. That disc is a recovery console (command prompt)
bootable CD. Using that CD, if you need an MSDOS-style
window to work in, when your Windows 7 partition is broken,
that CD is the one to use. It's only a couple hundred
megabytes in size. It is equivalent to this:
http://neosmart.net/blog/2009/windows-7-system-repair-discs/
Immediately after burning the five discs, I used ISO imaging
tools to make a copy of each DVD and store it on a hard drive.
That is in case the DVD goes bad, while in storage. I can use
Imgburn to make new copies if I want.
On a netbook, you have two options.
1) Connect an external USB2 optical DVD burner. Follow the
same procedure the laptop owners follow. Have at least
the five discs on hand, before you start.
2) Connect an external USB2 hard drive. Use regular backup
software, or cloning software, to image the entire hard drive.
When I did that, I think it took about 30GB or so on a hard
drive.
Some brands of netbooks, offer *nothing* in the way of tools
for the user. For such a case, you use a hard drive and the
cloning style option of the previous (2) to prepare for
the day the hard drive or SSD, fails.
When a netbook has only USB2 for external interface, that's
what you use to prepare your recovery. The netbook should
be bootable from USB, because otherwise, you'd be screwed.
With an Acer laptop, a dialog may appear on the screen,
nagging you to burn your recovery discs. If you missed
the dialog, the details are in the manual. If it is a
netbook, I would expect similar warnings, but who knows
for sure. I've seen complaints about some brands
of netbooks providing no tools, but without reading
all the manuals for them, I don't know for sure that
is the case or not.
Paul
