Lesson Learned - Restoring your Razer Blade 2014

Hi, just wanted to share this as a heads up to those who may foolishly tread down this road...

While restoring my blade in a what I can only describe as a fit of rage, I discovered that Razer has a unique restore feature that everybody should know about, if you didn't already. This may be normal for Razer, but its my first razor and I had no idea.

Should you find yourself going to the restore option on boot, you'll be presented with two buttons. One says restore and the other cancel. Should you have given up all hope of fixing your laptop on your own and in a fit of despair press the friendly restore button, be warned, it does as advertised. It wipes everything and puts it back to how you got it from the factory. Anything you've put on there will be gone very shortly after you press that fuzzy button. It also does it surprisingly quickly, like less then five minutes quick.

So if you're expecting a "are you sure?" or some options on what kind of restore you'd like to do, or you would like to keep anything you've installed, etc, prepare to be disappointed. It goes button->restored, nothing in the middle.

Back up, back up often.

Hope this helps.

 

That is both frightening and wonderful

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

A factory restore should only be needed in the most extreme circumstances (i.e. Windows is corrupted and will not boot). If you're having issue(s) with Windows but want to keep your data, first try "Refresh your PC without affecting your files" (Charms bar, Settings, Change PC settings, Update and recovery. Or you can simply search for it in Windows).

 

This is actually industry standard practice, and has been for well over a decade. It is no different than doing a "factory restore" with any other piece of equipment: from notebooks to OEM desktops to cellular phones.

Sometimes there is a note warning you that this will wipe all data and is irreversible. Depending on the manufacturer and the perceived technical aptitude [or ineptitude] of it's core demographic, it may or may not actually flash out in bright shiny lights "THIS WILL DESTROY YOUR DATA"

So lesson learned for you, and now I offer several pieces of advice to help mitigate future frustrations:

Cloud services / external hard drive:

These are AWESOME for making sure in the event of a catastrophic failure your data is protected. By either using a service like onedrive or dropbox [both have free components] not only can you backup your data to the cloud, you can access it from anywhere. Got a ton of music? Google play allows you to upload an UNGODLY ammount of it FOR FREE and access it via the web or on any convenient app for Android/iOS. Even WINDOWS PHONE has an app to access it [though it's a third party app and costs $0.99] For heavier backups, like large digital video collections, they have up to 2 TB 2.5" USB powered drives these days. Don't mind going with a larger form factor? They get BIGGER!

Windows built in system restore:

If Windows is acting up, you can try to restore your computer to an earlier snapshot with system restore. Restore options are in control panel/system/advanced. You can also use the charms bar "Settings /change PC settings/update and restore" to do soft restores of windows [or a complete O/S clean install -- WARNING: THAT ONE DELETES DATA]
Does you absolutely no good at all if the computer won't boot, but works miracles if you're pr0n surfing and forget to use protection ^^

 

This is my first Razer too. Does anyone know if we need to make a backup of that factory image like you do with the Alienware's?

 

Not having a warning that all you data is about to be deleted is simply poor user experience and poor software design. It is ridiculously trivial to code that benefit for the end user.

 

Not required, it will simply live as a recovery partition. I have read you can make one and free up the space on your HDD, but i haven't messed with it.

 

Actually, its a standard for mobile devices, which usually doesn't wipe you SD cards, etc. Windows has been doing this for ages and it always brings up a windows to give you options. I was expecting that. Having owned dozens of laptops, desktops, phones, etc, I've never encountered one that did this with such ease.

But to really put it into perspective of how bad of a design that is, should you have a small child or someone who hates you its:

1. F9
2. Destroy all your data.

Nothing in between. No way to stop it.

Granted simple warning or something wouldn't necessarily prevent either a child or hater, but the normal windows recovery with its various extra buttons to push would at least stop my son from wiping my computer. And I can only imagine some competitive gamer wiping your Blade before a match.

So I'm sure we can agree there should be something.

 

If you set a BIOS password, I wonder if that would be required before the restore.

In any case, I wouldn't trust anyone with physical access to my machine.