windows 10 system restore question


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Old 03-12-17, 11:48 AM
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windows 10 system restore question

I notice I have a system folder (OS drive C) and a recovery folder in my windows 10 system protection section. Do I need to enable protection on both of them to use system restore? I only have the system folder enabled and was able to create a restore point for it... Don't remember there being two folders in here. It is a dell pc and I read that the recovery folder may be a dell thing?....
 
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Old 03-12-17, 05:25 PM
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A restore point & a recovery partition are two different things. Both have value. What kind of protection are you do you mean?
 
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Old 03-12-17, 07:01 PM
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I just want to be able to restore my computer, if ever necessary.. When I go to system restore in my windows 10, I have two things I can enable restore protection on. One is the system drive/OS, and the other says recovery. Do I need to enable restore protection on both of those to be able to restore my computer to a previous restore point in the case of corrupted files etc?
 
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Old 03-12-17, 07:17 PM
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Recovery partitions as they come from the factory (especially those from big names like HP and Dell) are completely useless. They restore the computer to how it was when the image was created, which could be years out of date, and then it is loaded with manufacturer bloatware. It is never updated.

The best thing to do is create your own recovery partition. If you are ready to a wipe now, it's the best time.

Download the latest Windows 10 Media Creation Tool and run it. You will need an empty USB drive with at least 4GB of space. (here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...load/windows10)

Back up your drivers. Windows 10 does a pretty good job of getting drivers but there are still some devices it won't recognize. You can do this one of two ways.. Either go to the Dell website, insert your Service Tag number, and download the installers individually, or download a program called DoubleDriver which will search your system and back up every driver currently installed on your system to a USB drive. (here:http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...e-Driver.shtml)

Download a program called Macrium Reflect Free. (here: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree)

Back up all of your personal files.

Wipe the hard drive and create two partitions. One 20GB and the other the remainder.

Install Windows.

Run DoubleDriver and restore your drivers

Install all programs and set all personalizations you want to retain. DO NOT copy your personal files back to the machine at this time

Run Windows Update several times to ensure the system and all Microsoft programs are current.

Install Macrium Reflect and allow it to image your drive. Set the image destination to your 20GB recovery partition. This will take about half an hour.

Under Reflect Options, enable Install Reflect Boot Menu option. This will create a "Dual Boot" menu, allowing you to boot a PE environment that runs Reflect automatically.

Optionally, create a Reflect "Rescue Media" USB drive. This will launch the same PE environment as the Dual Boot. Use a 32GB drive, and copy the .mrimg file from your recovery partition to it. This will allow you to recover the machine quickly in case of a hard drive crash.

When you restore using this method, it will be back exactly the way you configured it.
 
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Old 03-12-17, 07:25 PM
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Whoah. Totally not interested in doing that. Not wiping my pc. Simply want to enable restore in case I ever need to restore it and curious if the recovery folder needs to be enabled in the restore section.
 
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Old 03-12-17, 07:46 PM
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No.

Insert 25 more characters here.
 
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Old 03-13-17, 10:20 AM
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Originally Posted by axxel
I notice I have a system folder (OS drive C) and a recovery folder in my windows 10 system protection section.

Do I need to enable protection on both of them to use system restore?

I only have the system folder enabled and was able to create a restore point for it... Don't remember there being two folders in here. It is a dell pc and I read that the recovery folder may be a dell thing?....
System restore is basically a system file backup of a specific point in time.

Recovery is Windows-10 automatic re-install process if Windows 10 is corrupted or new drivers fail, it fixes Windows, not your programs and files.

A recovery partition is a hidden area of the hard drive with a disk image of the computer's direct from-the-factory settings. If you're updated the drives or operating system, then it's really just the nuclear option of wiping everything and going back to the from-the-box-pc.

The "enable protection" option makes a shadow copy of the files in the folder.
Shadow copies can take up significant space, but are good to have.
If you have space on your drive, e.g. you're not getting a 90% full warning, I'd enable protection on both. That simply creates a backup of the backup.

While you're focused on this, you want to consider making a restore point onto DVDs.
Isue is that if the restore files are on the main hard drive, and you have a problem with the main hard drive, you're relying on restore files that are on the main hard drive.
Better to have your backups on a differenet drive than the main hard drive.
 
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Old 03-13-17, 11:05 AM
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If all you want is a restore point, create a date for your restore point & you're done. However, that does not cover all scenarios.
 
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Old 03-13-17, 08:56 PM
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There is no reason whatsoever to have a shadow copy of the restore partition. It will do nothing but waste space. It is never accessed, therefore it will never become corrupt - except in the case of the hard drive developing bad sectors, and at that point you're pretty much screwed anyway because a shadow copy can't be used to fix a recovery partition, nor can it be "restored" to a new drive. The only way to back up the recovery partition and have it be usable is to image it - which System Restore can't do.
 
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Old 03-14-17, 07:28 AM
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Thanks for all the info guys.

You got me thinking beyond restore now. Lets say I need to reinstall my windows 10. Wondering what I would need to do.This was a windows 7 dell laptop and I took the free upgrade to windows 10 that I downloaded. Ironically though, the laptop came with windows 8 OS reinstall disc. If I were to need to reinstall windows 10, what would I do? I know the free upgrade offer already expired.

Keep in mind I do not need to worry about recovering any data etc, as I regularly backup my important files on external drives, so my reinstall would only be to get my OS back, and not recovering any data.
 
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Old 03-14-17, 09:20 AM
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Originally Posted by axxell
so my reinstall would only be to get my OS back, and not recovering any data.
Do a dual boot system, 2nd installation of Win10 on a 2nd phycial harddrive.

If you've upgraded to Win 10, then you have a valid activation for that computer.
You can do a clean install, but install to a 2nd physical hard dive.
Bingo, you've got 2 live installations of Windows 10,
you can boot from the 2nd hard drive if something happens to the 1st .

I learned this from upgrading an ancient Dell Dimension 5150 from 32bit XP
to Win7 then free upgrade to 32 bit Win10.
Then I upgraded the computer so it would run 64 bit Windows 10.
Windows detected an active license and allows the 64 bit clean installation,
but I chose NOT to overwrite the 32 bit OS on C: drive and directed the
clean install to the D: drive, leaving the origional upgrade on C: drive intact.

So, now I have a dual boot Win 10 system, run Win 10 from C: or D: drive.
 
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Old 03-14-17, 11:29 AM
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There is no reason whatsoever to have a shadow copy of the restore partition.
That's a recovery partition not restore.
 
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Old 03-14-17, 02:13 PM
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That's a recovery partition not restore.
Thanks for the semantics. Yes I know, I mistyped.

Thanks for all the info guys.

You got me thinking beyond restore now. Lets say I need to reinstall my windows 10. Wondering what I would need to do.This was a windows 7 dell laptop and I took the free upgrade to windows 10 that I downloaded. Ironically though, the laptop came with windows 8 OS reinstall disc. If I were to need to reinstall windows 10, what would I do? I know the free upgrade offer already expired.

Keep in mind I do not need to worry about recovering any data etc, as I regularly backup my important files on external drives, so my reinstall would only be to get my OS back, and not recovering any data.
You would need to reinstall 10 from scratch. As I said before, the recovery partition is useless because it is a Windows 7 image (and contains all the factory Dell garbage). If you follow the steps I gave you above, it will replace the 7 recovery image with a clean 10 image that yoou can restore at any time. And as I said above, also copy that image file ([bunch-of-letters-and-numbers].mrimg) to a flash drive and you will be able to restore even in the event of a hard drive crash/replacement.

Do a dual boot system, 2nd installation of Win10 on a 2nd phycial harddrive.

If you've upgraded to Win 10, then you have a valid activation for that computer.
You can do a clean install, but install to a 2nd physical hard dive.
Bingo, you've got 2 live installations of Windows 10,
you can boot from the 2nd hard drive if something happens to the 1st .
That's a bad idea on many different levels. Ever since Vista, Windows OSs don't like to be part of dual-boot environments.

I learned this from upgrading an ancient Dell Dimension 5150 from 32bit XP
to Win7 then free upgrade to 32 bit Win10.
Then I upgraded the computer so it would run 64 bit Windows 10.
Windows detected an active license and allows the 64 bit clean installation,
but I chose NOT to overwrite the 32 bit OS on C: drive and directed the
clean install to the D: drive, leaving the origional upgrade on C: drive intact.

So, now I have a dual boot Win 10 system, run Win 10 from C: or D: drive.
This didn't happen. The digital entitlement licenses (the MS term for the "free upgrade") are validated via a hardware hash. Scanned components include the CPU and motherboard, RAM, HDD, video card, and other expansion cards. You can change any of the add-on parts (usually the CPU as well), but the activation is tied to the motherboard. If it is changed - except in the case of a failure and replacement with identical parts - the hash fails and the license is invalidated. You CAN NOT upgrade the motherboard and CPU (which you would've had to, since the 5150 motherboard was 32 bit and used a P4, as opposed to having a 64 bit motherboard with a 32 bit CPU and upgrading just the CPU, which usally doesn't screw the hash to where it trips the license) and have your license remain valid, because the motherboard and CPU are what constitute an individual computer - and digital entitlement licenses are very similar in terms to OEM licenses: they are locked to that individual computer (motherboard) and can not be transferred except to identical hardware in the case of a failure.
 
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Old 03-15-17, 08:54 AM
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You CAN NOT upgrade the motherboard and CPU (which you would've had to, since the 5150 motherboard was 32 bit and used a P4,...
Are you sure that’s correct? I thought the 5150 can support the Pentium 4 6xxx which is 64 bit capable (the 5xxx isn’t though, but the 5150 supports both). The board has the 775 processor socket and 945G chipset and 1066 clock speed.

So why won’t it support a 64 bit OS? I think if you upgrade from the 5xxx to the 6xxx you can run a 64 bit OS and you don’t need to change the motherboard. Or is that not correct?
 
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Old 03-15-17, 05:13 PM
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Originally Posted by taz420

This didn't happen.
Um, yes, it did.

Better to keep quiet if somebody explains how TO do, something you CAN'T do.

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Sorry to go all Pei Mei about this,
but the lack of understanding about how I did this is, well, disconcerting.
Why focus the discussion on one person's lack of understanding?
It's the classic Bumble Bee rule,
The more somebody authoritatively states that "it can't work",
the funnier it is that in the real world, yeah, it actually does work.


#1
Yes, you can install two copies of Windows 10 on the same computer.
Just put them on different drives.

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#2
Yes, you can run 64 bit Windows 10 if you upgrade a Dell Dimension 5150.
I'd doing it now. The fact that somebody doesn't understand HOW I did it
may be objectively funny, but it is ultimately irrelevant to this discussion.
If you are convinced you can't do something, don't bother, it's not worth it.
But NEVER let somebody ELSE convince you that you can't do something.

#3
Interesting distinction, some say "you can't do it", because THEY can't do it,
that doesn't stop the people who do it because it can be done.
 

Last edited by Hal_S; 03-15-17 at 06:05 PM.
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Old 03-16-17, 02:59 PM
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Originally Posted by zoesdad
I thought the 5150 can support the Pentium 4 6xxx which is 64 bit capable (the 5xxx isn’t though, but the 5150 supports both). The board has the 775 processor socket and 945G chipset and 1066 clock speed.
So why won’t it support a 64 bit OS? I think if you upgrade from the 5xxx to the 6xxx you can run a 64 bit OS and you don’t need to change the motherboard. Or is that not correct?
You're correct.
It will.

Dell 5150 running 32 bit XP on 512 megs of ram, is now running 64 bit Win10 with 3GB ram.
Fastest CPU the 5150 it will take is a Pentium D-945.

Oddly, Intel's tests report that some Pentium chips have the 64 bit instructions, to run Win10, but the Chip/bios doesn't report that capability to Windows, so the 64 bit installation hangs. Drop in a Pentium D-945 CPU and the 64 bit installation works.

Oh, back to the OP,
Originally Posted by axxel
the laptop came with windows 8 OS reinstall disc. If I were to need to reinstall windows 10, what would I do? I know the free upgrade offer already expired.
Well, the machine is already "registered" so it should allow you to reinstall via Win10 installation files downloaded to USB or DVD. Probably a good idea to grab them now,
the "Get Windows Now" nag to install Windows 10 as an upgrade to Win 7-8 has expired, but upgrades using downloaded installation media appears to still work.
https://www.extremetech.com/computin...ally-available
 
 

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