Samsung NP550P7C - Booting from CD?

I've had this laptop only a few days and am trying to familiarise myself with both machine and os (Windows 8.1) - a mammoth task for a silver surfer like me. I intend to make an image of the o.s. with Macrium Reflect and have just burnt their rescue cd. But how to boot from it? If I press F2 at boot-up I get the Aptio Setup utility (and am not sure what to do in there). Is there a way to have a simple set of options at boot-up, and I could then pick CD or DVD? My Samsung scanty guide is of not much use and support even less so. May be some good soul can point me in some kind of direction on this subject?

 

Hello Martia, welcome to NBR.

If you press F10 at boot (immediately after power on) you should get a list of boot devices. On some models it's Esc. But in order to actually boot a USB device, there are some settings in your BIOS (F2) that must be changed temporarily:

Fast Boot / Fast BIOS = disabled
Legacy USB Boot = enabled (if you have that)
SecureBoot = disabled
OS Mode Selection = UEFI and CSM OS (for some boot sources)

It's great that you made backups first. But do note that partition backups made with 3rd party tools (such as the one you used) usually end up destroying the computer's Recovery feature if you try to restore it. It's a quirk with these Samsung machines. What you want is a so-called bootable factory image backup, created with the built-in Recovery on a 32GB USB stick (most sticks other than Sandisk are fine).

If you look around here or Google site:notebookreview.com/samsung bootable factory image backup usb you'll find plenty of discussion about that.

 

THANKS A MILLION! F10 did it. I can now easily boot from Macrium rescue CD from which my external USB drive (where backups could be stored) is also accessible.

Re: my Aptio BIOS which I reach with F2 - I'm rather confused in there. Its controls are the following:
F5/F6 change opt. - F3 previous values - F9 optimized defaults - F10 save & reset - ESC exit.
What should I pick if I just go in there to look around and do NOT want to change anything? ESC does nothing so I've used F10 and hope it's the right command? And would you know what F9 *optimized defaults* means?
-------
Re: bootable factory image backup.
I take good note of your precious advice and am going to look into it all.
Though I'd also like to keep organising the imaging with Macrium Reflect - in the future I could then make images at different intervals and extract single files from them if needs be. I suppose I'd be safe if I image only the C: drive and restore only this in case of Windows problems - or else I could also image the *whole* of the disk so that Recovery feature and all get also backed up? ... oh gosh I hope I'm right in my thinking.

My disk consists of these partitions (according to Disk Manager):
1) Recovery part/ - 499 MB
2) EFI system part/ - 300 MB
3) C: - 906 GB
4) Recovery part/ - 349 MB
5) Recovery part/ - 22.44 GB
6) Recovery part/ - 1.00 GB

When I ask Macrium Reflect to *create an image of the partition required to restore Windows* it automatically selects:
- # 2 (above)
- a *unformatted* primary of 128 MB which I can't see in Disk Management
- # 3 (above)

I suppose it'd be ok restoring such ones: the remaining recovery partitions would be left alone?
I just mention all this on the off chance someone else around here has gone through the same procedure on my kind of machine and has a comment - I don't *expect* answers, of course. But so grateful to you for helping in the first place