Restore

[halfpint1959]

My HP Pavilion laptop was under warranty when it had a hard drive and motherboard problem.  I sent it to the independent tech support contracted by Office Max, who installed a new hard drive and motherboard.  It installed Windows 8.1 on the computer.  But it did not install a backup drive with Windows 8.1  for a complete system restore.   I would like to format the hard drive create and install Windows 8.1.  on a portion of the hard drive for the convenience in case of a problem.  I do have the discs but need the step by step procedure to do this.  Is anyone able to help me with this?  Thank you in advance for any assistance you can give me. 

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

halfpint1959

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

Sorry, but the HP Recovery Media will not allow you to do what you want to do -- install to only part of the drive.  Its first step is to erase the ENTIRE drive, and then reformat it using the original partition scheme set by HP.

If you want to make a backup image, a better approach is to use a third-party tool known as Macrium Reflect -- which I have used for years.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition.  This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 10 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore.  

Plus, MR has the option to Add a Recovery Boot Menu entry.  This allows you then to boot into WinRE, and you can then use that to do a restore -- when you can't boot into Windows!

You COULD do the process of shrinking the partitions on your drive, using the MS Disk Management utility, creating a new partition, and running MR to store the image backup on that partition.  The problem with this approach is if the hard drive becomes corrupted or fails, you've lost your only backup.  So, storing the backup on an external device is a much better and more reliable approach.

Good Luck

[halfpint1959]

Thank you so much for the information.