Hi everybody, my wife recently purchased a HP-Compaq Laptop with Win7 Home Premium 32bit. I have since reformatted "C" drive and installed Win 7 64. Its setup the way she likes or at least it was until my son got to it and ruined the windows installation. I have again reinstalled Win 7 64 and once again have it the way my wife likes it. What I would like to do is replace the Base.wim and other files on the recovery partion with files that will allow the current system image to be quickly restored in the future. Could anybody advise step by step how to do this, if possible i would like to use F11 function that activates the standard HP recovery process to restore the Win 7 64 not the preinstalled win 7 32 image. Thanks Mike
I do not know how exactly a laptop works, but on a build-your own desktop PC with only the box, one can do back up and restore and make a system image first and then system disc. Sevenforums has a tutorial on this. Do that on a different disk (preferably external). I have made an image of win 7 plus most important softwares plus customisations but without NVIDIA or other drivers and office 2010. Restoring from system image takes less than 15 mins from thinking about it to getting back the image. Plus it saves 1-2 hrs.
You could look into Enhanced HP Backup and Recovery Manager for Microsoft Windows Vista that works well on some windows 7 notebooks and laptops etc
to be honest ju8st try and get a hold of acronis trueimage it can make another hidden recovery partition and you can restore from F11 or from archives stored elsewhere.
I agree with urie - Acronis trueimage 2010 is worth getting hold of - there are plenty of places to get it from if you don't mind warez but it is fairly cheap and worth it.
The HP Recovery Partition is probably based on WinRE. If as you say the old OS was 32bit, then the WinRE is also 32bit & you won't be able to update the .wim's to 64bit.... I've thrown Server 2003 on a old PC & use Ghost Cast to backup partitions to it... WinPE from CD or USB with ghost32.exe can backup any OS, 32 & 64bit.. You can also map network drives & use .wim's if you like...