How to burn more than one recovery image

How to create more than one Lenovo recovery image

After making a recovery image in order to install everything to my Intel 310, I decided I wanted copies on DVD as well. By default this doesn't work, but the process for undoing this limitation is actually pretty easy. It's easy enough, I guess, to just use third party software to image over the info to new drives/discs, but if you made a USB disc and decide you want DVDs (my situation) this isn't so trivial. Hope this helps...

• Under 'Folder Options' in Control Panel, go to the 'View' tab.
• In the 'Advanced Settings' box, click 'Show hidden files, folders and drives' and uncheck 'Hide protected operating system files'
• Under computer, right-click your Q: drive and hit 'Open'.
• Go in the FactoryRecovery folder and open 'service_done.ini' with a text editor.
• The second line of the file says 'DONE=1'. Change this to 'DONE=0'.
• Check the 'FactoryRecovery' folder. If there is a file there called 'cdrivebackup.wim', then you're done: burn to your heart's content! Each time you need to make another one, just set the Done bit to 0.
  
• If not, and there instead smaller files (2GB each) called 'cdrivebackupX.swm', then you've got to do one of two things:

1. If you're like me and imaged to a new drive, but still haven't formatted the old one yet, then you can get this file from the old q:\ partition on the drive you're replacing. Just delete cdrivebackup*.swm and replace with cdrivebackup.wim. Congratulations, you're done! Burn to your heart's content!
   
2. If you haven't got this file, then you've got to regenerate it with a Windows utility called imagex.exe. This usually comes as part of the gargantuan Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), but thankfully, the Lenovo Recovery program makes use of it, so it's already installed. This is what you've gotta do:

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• Copy Cdrivebackup*.swm to your desktop.
• Add
• to your Path variable. You can edit your environmental variables by right-clicking Computer (on your Desktop or in the Start Menu), clicking 'Properties', clicking Advanced System Settings in the left pane, and going to the Advanced tab. There are two Path variables, one for users and one for the system, but it didn't work when I added it to users for some reason, so I suggest you add it to the system path variable.
• Open a command window by typing 'cmd' in the Start Menu searchbox and hitting enter.
• cd to your Desktop.
• Execute the following command:
• The program will now merge the files for you. On my SSD it took 3-4 minutes, and it probably won't be much slower on an HDD.
• Move the resulting image back to Q:\FactoryRecovery\.
• Burn to your heart's content!

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Very nice! But thst doesn't mean I'm not confused. Does this differ from MS Backup and restore, other than having to reinstal software? With MS backup and restore it's load the DVD and go.

Renee

 

Well this burns an image of the OS as it was at the factory, without any customizations you may have made since you bought your computer (name, age, whatever). Even if you'd rather make custom images through Windows backup, this might come in handy if, say, you ever want to resell the computer: you can claim it's in the factory state. (Though you might want to update the drivers by then.)

 

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