up vote 2 down vote favorite

My windows XP notebook manufacturer provides a software to create recovery CD/DVD. (The model does not have a inbuilt CD/DVD drive, instead I have an external USB CD/DVD drive). But in the BIOS settings, there is no option to set the bootable drive to CD/DVD, instead it has only two options: HDD or FDD.

  1. So in case of any issues, how will I be able to use this recovery CD/DVD to boot?

  2. And does the recovery CD/DVD acts as an Image restore, by restoring the entire state of the primary drive, with all the softwares that were installed till the point when the recovery disk was created, or will it reverts to a clean windows factory install.

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Should probably be on superuser. Voted to migrate. – samoz Jul 23 '09 at 18:11

migrated from stackoverflow.com

4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

What kind of netbook is it? There should be an option in the BIOS to boot from USB Drive.

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Make sure the USB CD-ROM is connected when you go into the BIOS or it might not give the option. – Chris Thompson Jul 23 '09 at 20:09
up vote 1 down vote

  1. I'd take it back where you bought it and ask them how you're supposed to boot from the CD. Geek Squad can probably help if you don't want to take it back to the original place you bought it.

  2. The recovery CD restores the state of the drive back to the point when the CD was created. Normally this will be the exact state the machine was in when you bought it.

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up vote 0 down vote

The best way to find out is plug in your external CD drive with the Restore drive in it, let us know what it does and we'll be able to help.

Plus like xxl3ww said: what brand of netbook is it? So we could browse their website for documentation.

For your second question: does your system have two partitions? Like C: with Windows on it and D: with your recovery files? Then using the CD to do a system restore will restore it to the point where the latest system restore was performed, which is most likely when Windows was installed.

Plus I wouldn't recommend updating your system restore, because a "clean" install is more preferable due to Windows slowing down over time.

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up vote 0 down vote

If the system has an FDD you could try creating a bootable floppy that can load USB drivers and the CD/DVD drivers. I suggest checking the CD drive manufacturer documentation/website for info about this.

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