making a recovery disc (usb) for win 8.1?

[tommo123]

i just recently upgraded to 8.1 from 8 (which ran flawlessly for months tbf) but tonight on a reboot i had a grey screen of death.

then i find out there's no F8 on it. quick google says reboot PC as widows logo appears a few times kicks in a repair mode (thank god).

anyhoo, realised i hadnt made a recovery disk and found on making one in windows you get a scare few files on a flash drive and no recovery partition.

for that apparently you have to copy a "install.wim" from your install cd? prob is it's meant to be in the resources folder and that file isn't there on my win8 install cd (win8.1 was updated online so no CD).

best just to use macrium or something or is this something that can work in 8.1?

 

[TheELF]

You can legaly download it,the whole dvd,and have it available,but I guess you can also copy only the install.wim after it is done to save on size.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media

 

[tommo123]

so far what i've done is create a macrium bootable flash drive (need to test) and made an image which just about fit on there.

also made a "WindowsImageBackup" which was a PITA to find but was hidden in a menu of something else. i figure i'll use your option as well but the other 2 as well should pretty much cover me outside of a hardware problem

 

[corkyg]

I simply have duplicate drives for 8.1. Cloned with Acronis TI 2015. Swapping drives in a mobile rack (SATA) is simple and quick. Much more efficient than backup/restore or reinstall.

 

[tommo123]

i've made bootable recovery media (windows and macrium) with macrium images of both machines on the flash drive and the windows recovery data on 2 seperate internal drives.

p,s - why the hell is "system image backup" accessible only (afaik) by going into "file history"?!

either way i can boot and have 2 different ways to play with and recover if needs be. losing the OS drive is an annoyance. the others are way more important (meaning i need to get off my ass and hurry up with my backups!)

 

[tommo123]

.1