Recovery Disc Options

Recently purchased a Panny ToughBook CF-18. Got most of my questions answered by either Panasonic or the re-seller. Although oddly enough, some "simple" questions couldn't be answered by either. i.e. Can I increase HDD size to 120GB. Re-seller: "I don't know", Panasonic: "CF-18 comes with 60GB HDD and can not be changed to a larger HDD". Needless to say, my notebook now has a 120GB HDD working perfectly...

Now my question about the Recovery Discs: Unit came w/ a set of 4 CD's. They contain the OS: Win XP Tablet 2005 and all associated apps for this unit. Can I put these apps and the OS on a single DVD and include all the up-dated drivers? If so, how? To the best of my knowledge, nLite doesn't work w/ recovery discs.

...screamer

 

My sony vaio came with multiple recovery cd's. What i did was make an iso image of the bootcd and then added the data from the other recovery disks to that iso. Finally i burned it to dvd so i had a single recovery disk.

However the best recovery option i found was to use acronis trueimage to create a bootable usb flashdrive and then create an image of my laptop onto the flashdrive. Its quick and easy and more durable than a dvd.

 

Maybe they mean that they don't offer one, so if you do, you are on your own, and they will blame any problem you may have in the future on the fact that you changed the hardware and will not fix anything under warranty.

Or maybe I just have a suspicious mind...

 

Hi,

In theory, you can do any alteration you wish to improve its performance.

In reality, you may have rendered its so-called "factory warranty" invalid.

Be careful to read its fine prints on Warranty paper.

Take care.

 

@ HO & Perman: perhaps you're correct, but from the gist of the e-mail, I got "It Can't Be Done". On a Notebook Forum I visit, I got from a Panny Tech, that it can be done as long as one uses a compatible HDD no larger than 120GB. So I just bought a larger Hitachi than was installed. If I blew the warrantee, so be it.

@ Farmerlee: Do you use this flash drive as an exclusive "Boot n Restore" device. I made an ATI boot drive from a flash drive, but the files are in a folder. I don't know how I will boot from this??
My ATI image is 14.2GB so it won't fit on a flash drive. I have it on a portable external HDD. I didn't image prior to loading other software

...screamer

 

Yes, for security reasons that particular flashdrive is only used for boot and restore, it only has a basic windows install image on it so its nice and small.
You can make you external hard drive bootable if you wish, mudcrab has a good guide to set that up.

 

I guess I could make an FD-ISR SS, strip it down and then put an image on a FlashDrive.

Yeah, I got that, thanks!

Decisions, Decisions??

...screamer

 

...In that case be fair to the Panasonic tech. It sounds like he gave you a legitimate answer, if not very detailed. It is probably a limitation of the controller, or the BIOS that limits the HDD size to 120GB. I am basing that on a similar limit that I have encountered on a desktop computer. I can almost remember what it's called..."extended data addressing", or something like that. You probably know that better than I do, by now.


-HandsOff