Problems creating system restore disk windows 7

[alweldon]

I have an HP laptop with Windows 7 home premium. When using the HP Recovery manager to create system restore disks, everythong goes ok until I get through the point where it tells me that I will need 4 DVDs and that I should insert one. After inserting the disk, the drive spins for a coouple of seconds, then I get the messages:

"There was a problem burning this disk."

"There was an error burning this disk. The disk might no longer be usable."


I retried several times, inserting different blank DVD-R disks, but always get the same result.

Any suggestions?

 

[Ubrales]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums!

I use DVD+RW re-writable disks for such purposes. Cost effective.

Is the DVD drive in good working order?

 

[alweldon]

I think so. It plays movie DVD's ok, and I just tried burning a music file and that worked ok.

 

[RetiredChief]

Try using windows 7 built in function to do this.
.. Go to control panel, select backup, then select create system backup.
.. This will create an image of the "c" drive to distination (HDD or DVDs). when completed it will prompt you to create a Bootable repair disk to restore the image.

The problem, I think, is related to the amount of data to be written to a given disk. The amount of space is greater than what can "really" be writed to the DVD disk even though it is less than the advertized size. I seem to remeber reading about this but can not find the source. (Added, this in not the base 10 vs base 2 diff where a 4.7 gig disk only holds about 4.3 gigs)

 

[Traildriver]

What size DVD disc are you using? 4.7 GB (single-sided, single-layer – common) or the 8.5–8.7 GB (single-sided, double-layer)?

Try the other type and see what that does. I doubt that is the problem but ....

 

[alweldon]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Sorry for not replying, was out of town for a while. Nothing seemed to work. I'm thinking that something went wrong with my first attempt and left the file in some state that indicates that the file has already been copied. And, of course, it won't let you copy it a second time. I finally gave up and just purchased a restore file from HP.

 

[alweldon]

Best answer selected by alweldon.