System Image

[silverhawk99]

Trying to create a system image on a usb stick.

Receiving "invalid backup location".

Trying to perform data back up of existing laptop with approx. 30GB worth of information to backup - am using HP Recovery Manager and it is very slow, any suggestions? 45 mins only 10% completed. Is this standard timing for data back up with HP laptops? 3GB per hour?

Thanks!

[Karthik · Accepted solution]

Please check to ensure that the pen drive has enough space for both OS and your Backup content.

Suggest format the pen drive in fat32 format before making it a recovery drive.

This might help:

http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03481733

[silverhawk99]

Hello,

Thank you for the help and advice. I needed to format to NTFS in order for the system image backup to save to the removable media (USB format to NTFS for system image).

***

If I understand your response to my question regarding 3GB's per hour for data to save on a NTFS data backup attempt, you are saying that FAT32 is more user friendly in terms of saving data to that file format - IE: it saves data faster?

***

In any event, I stopped trying to perform a data backup via the recovery environment where you manually select the individual files (system and or personal) to include with the data backup process. The reason I had been doing that step was because I thought you needed to perform a backup data successfully in order for the system image process to recognize that media as a valid backup location.

With a bit of research on the HP forums, I found that you can save a system image of this laptop Stream 13 to a USB removable drive provided the format is NTFS and you establish a "share" where the system image backup utilizy will recognize a "share" network location   \\laptop name\"share" name ... this failed on first attempt, and finally on my third attempt I got a window indicating that the system image completed successfully. Initially, I was told one of the drives failed to copy and that the system image backup failed - even though there were files copied to the USB removable media... second attempt - my laptop ran out of gas and it shutdown mid backup attempt...  apparently, this didn't corrupt the backup files because system image utilizy picked up right where it left off and finished what it had started I guess using the files it had already saved to the USB removable media.

A long process, but educational indeed I learned about diskpart, volumes, file formats, system image vs file backup, HP recovery environment, and more!

Thanks!

Matt