How to restore to new HD if old HD dies?

I have a new Series 5 laptop, and I'm uncertain about how the Samsung Recovery Solution would work if the hard drive dies and is replaced by a new blank drive.

So let's say I've done the intial state backup, and perhaps a later complete backup using SRS. If the hard drive dies and is replaced by a new blank one, it won't have any recovery partition, so it seems pressing F4 on boot would produce nothing. I would have the complete backup on an external drive, but how do I restore from that backup to the new hard drive?

Samsung included a disk with my computer called System Recovery Media, subtitled Windows 7 Home Premium SP1. It's not at all clear what's on it. It just talks about recovering the operating system, so it may just be Windows. Anybody know what's on that disk?

Anyway, it seems to me with a new hard drive I'm going to need some backup source that can boot and then restore everything, including the recovery partition, but it's not clear that SRS lets me create that. Maybe if I make a complete backup to DVD's, that would work?

I understand that as long as the recovery partition is good I can boot into SRS and do the restore from there. But it's not clear how this works if the drive has been replaced. Can anyone explain exactly how this works?

 

1. The Samsung System Recovery disc is a generic Windows installation disc. Use the SRS backup option to make a backup disc of the drivers and software. You can then use both to make a working installation on a new HDD.

2. SRS looks for the Recovery Partition so it won't be comfortable on a new HDD.

3. If you are keen on having a fully functioning backup / restore capability then I would suggest that you look beyond SRS to a product such as Acronis TrueImage which provides much greater flexibility.

John

 

Well, under your #1 I could create a functioning system, but what I really want to do is restore the most recent full backup to the new disk. Starting over from scratch is exactly what I want to avoid.

It just seems crazy that Samsung doesn't provide a bootable CD/DVD with SRS on it that would let you restore a previous complete backup to a new hard drive. But if I understand you correctly, they do not.

I've read elsewhere about a special secret passworded access to the recovery partition that lets you do various things. Maybe that will provide a solution if that's available on this model.

 

This page, and others linked on it, provide Samsung's detailed description of SRS 5. That may give a better answer than I can provide because I haven't tested all the functions. However, those descriptions don't appear to mention that SRS works in conjunction with the recovery partition. I've just tried running the data restore option in SRS but it comes up with an "Unable to find backup file information", presumably because I deleted the recovery partition (I needed the space). SRS works for people with modest requirements and who don't incur problems such as a HDD failure.

John

 

The best bet is to create a system image with windows back up and restore. Also create a boot disk. Now I am not sure if you create a boot disk if it also brings over the USB 3 drivers. So you may need those on a seperate USB stick. I'll nkow for sure later on when I get my samsung gamer.

Now so long as your data is on the system image you will have a full restore. This means though backing up at least nightly. With my P79xx I would do this to the internal secondary drive, and yes it has come in handy since I do not use system restore from older dates etc. I should note though if doing a restore on a large drive off USB 2 you had better have alot of free time.

 

I just wanted to follow up on this and report what I've done in case it might be useful to others. My computer is a Series 5 NP550P5C-T01US which uses SRS5 and has a 750GB regular hard drive, no SSD.

On boot, I pressed F4 to go into recovery mode. When it finished loading, I hit Ctl-Alt-F10, and entered the password "secclx". That took me into SRS Admin mode. From there, I exported a copy of the original as-built backup image. The files in this image were dated in May, 2012, and this explains why I was not prompted to make an initial backup image on first run - Samsung had already done that, and placed the image in the recovery partition.

I also exported a copy of the MBR, just in case. That's a 32KB binary file which is an image of the first track of the drive.

Then, it lets you create a bootable CD thumb drive version of SRS5. I tested this, and it is indeed bootable. You have to go into setup - F2 - and make the CD stick the first boot device, and then it does boot up into a strange version of SRS, from which it looks like you could build an image of the original drive, complete with recovery partition.

So it looks like with these three items you would be able to create a functioning SRS restore function on a brand new blank drive, from which you could restore a much more recent backup. I haven't actually tested this, but someone with an extra laptop hard drive might want to give it a try.

The only thing that may be remaining is the 100 MB partition at the beginning of the drive - the System partition that has no drive letter. I just don't know whether SRS incudes that in the Complete Backup images it creates. Does anyone know the answer?

Well, the key to this is the creation of the bootable SRS Admin USB stick that lets you boot into SRS even if the main hard drive is blank.

But in the end, I think I'm going to use something like Macrium to do image backups. I'm going to encrpyt the drive with Truecrypt, and I think Macrium may work better with encryption.

Hope this is useful to someone.