Can you create recovery discs off an ME hard drive?

[bd1886]

Now have two Gateway machines w/no os cd's for repair or re- install. Is there a way to make them off the hard drive. Looked around and didn't find a clear answer when talking about Gateway boxes. Thanks.

[Panama Red]

Nope, not on the older machines. The newer ones that come with a recovery partition like HP offer you the option to make your own Recovery CD/DVD's but that's ony with XP. If you can find an ME disk it should install ok using the Product Key that should be on the case. Personally, I prefer Windows 2000 Pro on those older machines with 256Mb of ram. Very stable combination.

[HAL9000]

Check for a directory C:\WINDOW\OPTIONS\Setup (or could be install instead of setup), if that exists, copy that to a safe place as those are all of your install files.

[kilgoretrout]

In that situation, probably the best recovery/disaster plan is to image the windows partition to another hard drive with an imaging program like Acronis True Image. Imaging programs can be run off a boot cd or boot floppy(s) in the event of disaster and you can restore the windows partition from the image.
This has been addressed several times on this forum. The usual, and I feel the best, advice is to get an external usb hard drive enclosure from Apricorn since these all come with a version of Acronis True Image included with the enclosure:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817155601

Then just get a large ide drive and plop it in the enclosure. You then image your windows partition(s) to the external hard drive from which you can do a restore if necessary. This is a very common and excellent backup solution for home users.