F10 Recovery on home built system

[caslad81]

Hi all,

I have just completed my first home built system which has gone well, but one thing eludes me. In the past I have always bought PCs and they have always had an option to recover the system to the factory original spec by pressing F10 during startup. I am aware that this is done by using a seperate partition on the HDD to recovery it to its original state. My question is can I implament this feature myself on my home built system and if I can what software if any do I need. I am aware that I can get the same result using ghost and what not, but I was wondering if I could do it the F10 way!

Thanks in advance

Mark

 

[WR2]

You could do something similar. Except your home built would never have the F10 option written into the BIOS. You'd have to use the F8 boot menu or other bootable media (CD/DVD/USB flash drive) and go from there.
Or you could go one step farther and install a complete, working copy of your OS on a partition using ghost or a similar program. You'd be able to boot that partition any time you wanted.
Or you could just slipstream the latest hotfixes, service pack, and IE8 RC to have a fully ready, easy to use re-instail OS DVD.
Also checkout Ultimate Boot CD or Ultimate Boot CD for Windows

The F10 recovery is mainly an option for OEMs system builders who don't include the OS media (CD or DVD).

 

[Proximon]

You can also create restore points in Vista and XP.

The slipstream method is quite powerful as well, and can actually result in a superior installation compared to just the CD and updates.

http://www.nliteos.com/index.html

 

[Winly]

you can create a hard drive partition, after a clean windows installation and then download the program Acronis True Image. then you will create an image of the main C Drive "which contains the operating system" then you will save that backup file in the new partition. finally, you will create a bootable cd so in case of any crashes you will use that cd to restore the machine to its defaults, which in this case will be after you installed windows the first day. all this "imaging" can be done by using Acronis and it will take less than 30 minutes depending on the files you have. but beleive it save lifes hehe. i have done this may many times. in fact, you can restore your system in minutes, lets say 10 minutes the maximum!!