Testing a Recovery CD

Dartz · 29-03-2009 5:17pm #1

So anyway, I have a 2.odd year old Philips PC downstairs, that's in desperate need of a reinstall of it's operating system(XP Media Centre). The problem with this is, it only came with one of those ****ty recovery partitions where you have to make the recovery disk yourself.

Which is what I did.

Now then, beforeI wipe the entire drive, I'm trying to find away to test the DvD I made. I tried running the DvD in VirtualPC, but only received a 'system not supported' error. I want to test this disk and make sure it'll work properly before I actually go through the bother of erasing/reinstalling the system. I dont want to be left halfway through with a Blue Screen of Death, and an unuseable system. Because getting an XP Media Centre .iso is going to be a bloody pain. And then there's the system drivers for this thing.

Does anyone have any idea how I can test this disk before running it?

Capt'n Midnight · 29-03-2009 6:05pm

if you had a check sum you could compare it

use isobuster to generate a checksum and search for that sum on the interweb

Dartz · 29-03-2009 7:02pm

It's not the checksum I'm worried about, that checked out when I was burning the thing. It whether or not when I put this thing in, will it work? I've heard of people having problems with similar recovery partitions, and being left in the lurch with no PC of their own because of that. They burn the disk, and it bluescreens on them.

Capt'n Midnight · 29-03-2009 8:02pm

The DVD will fail in virtual PC because it can't see the real BIOS or something
can't remember if Vmware allows passthrough ?

OK checksum means the DVD is as the vendor intended.

to know more you'd have to google for recovery stories on the model of your computer OR put in a different hard drive and try to restore to it.

TestTransmission · 29-03-2009 8:05pm

Could you not just run the recovery from the partition itself,ie..not using the dvd?

Dartz · 29-03-2009 8:44pm

Nope...

I hate these cheapskate PC's, I really do. Pay 1500 euro for a PC, and they dont even bother to give you a recovery disk. I'll google around and see what I see.

Thing is, I bought the PC 2 years ago, and only made the disk yesterday, so I'm not sure what condition the filesin the recovery partition were in. Ah well, I'll give it a go during the week, and if it doesnt work, I'll just download a .iso from somewhere and try that.

TestTransmission · 29-03-2009 9:09pm

Really?

Surely if you could make the recovery discs you could also run the recovery?

Testing a Recovery CD

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