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Thursday, January 5, 2012
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Windows 8 To Offer Easier And Faster Recovering Options
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Windows 8 will offer two options to provide a way for
users to restore the operating system to a clean state
- reset and refresh.
The "Reset" feature will remove all personal data,
apps, and settings from the PC, and will reinstall
Windows. The "Refresh" option will Keep all personal
data, Metro style apps, and important settings from the
PC, and will reinstall Windows.
Resetting your Windows 8 PC goes like this:
- The PC boots into the Windows Recovery Environment
(Windows RE).
- Windows RE erases and formats the hard drive
partitions on which Windows and personal data reside.
- Windows RE installs a fresh copy of Windows.
- The PC restarts into the newly installed copy of
Windows.
For those of you who worry about data that may still be
recoverable after a standard reset, especially on PCs
with sensitive personal data, Microsoft will be
providing an option in Windows 8 Beta to erase your
data more thoroughly, with additional steps that can
limit the effectiveness of even sophisticated data
recovery attempts. Instead of just formatting the
drive, choosing the "Thorough" option will write random
patterns to every sector of the drive, overwriting any
existing data visible to the operating system.
According to Microsoft, resetting the PC (quick) will
take 6 minutes 12 seconds. A thorough reset with
BitLocker enabled will take approximately
6 minutes 21 seconds. Finally, resetting the PC
thorough, without BitLocker will take you 23 minutes 52
seconds.
Resetting your PC can take you back to square one if
you encounter a problem, but that?s clearly a very
heavy weight solution. But what if you could get the
benefit of a reset ? starting over with a fresh Windows
install ? while still keeping your stuff intact? This
is where Refresh comes in handy. Refresh functionality
is fundamentally still a reinstall of Windows, just
like resetting your PC as described above, but your
data, settings, and Metro style apps are preserved.
The coolest part about Refresh is there?s no need to
first back up your data to an external hard drive and
restore them afterwards.
Refreshing your PC goes like this:
- The PC boots into Windows RE.
- Windows RE scans the hard drive for your data,
settings, and apps, and puts them aside (on the same
drive).
- Windows RE installs a fresh copy of Windows.
- Windows RE restores the data, settings, and apps it
has set aside into the newly installed copy of Windows.
- The PC restarts into the newly installed copy of
Windows.
According to Microsoft, refreshing your PC will take
approximately 8 minutes 22 seconds.
Unlike manually reinstalling Windows, you don't have to
go through the Windows Welcome screens again and
reconfigure all the initial settings, as your user
accounts and those settings are all preserved. You can
sign in with the same account and password, and all of
your documents and data are preserved in the same
locations they were before. To accomplish this,
Microsoft actually used the same imaging and migration
technologies behind Windows Setup.
To ensure that Refresh is both effective in fixing
problems and in making sure users don't lose settings
that they might have trouble reconfiguring, Microsoft
has thought a great deal about which settings to
preserve. In Windows 8 Beta, some of the settings Microsoft will
preserve include:
- Wireless network connections
- Mobile broadband connections
- BitLocker and BitLocker To Go settings
- Drive letter assignments
- Personalization settings such as lock screen
background and desktop wallpaper
On the other hand, Microsoft deliberately chose not to
preserve the following settings, as they can
occasionally cause problems if misconfigured:
- File type associations
- Display settings
- Windows Firewall settings
In the Refresh option only Metro style apps are
preserved, and require desktop apps that do not come
with the PC to be reinstalled manually. Microsoft does
this for two reasons. First, in many cases there is a
single desktop app that is causing the problems that
lead to a need to perform this sort of maintenance, but
identifying this root cause is not usually possible.
And second, it will prevent users from inadvertently
reinstall "bad" apps that were installed
unintentionally.
You can, however, cleanly install and uninstall all
Metro style apps using the .appx package format. If you
do need to reinstall some desktop apps after you
refresh your PC, Microsoft saves the list of apps that
were not preserved in an HTML file, and put this list
on the desktop, so you have a quick way to see what you
might need to reinstall and where to find them.
One caution is that if any desktop apps you have
require a license key, you will need to follow your
manufacturer's instructions for how to reuse the key.
This might involve uninstalling the app first, going to
a web site, or going through some automated steps by
phone, for example.
In Windows 8 Beta, there will also be a tool that you
can use to create a bootable USB flash drive, in case
even the copy of Windows RE on the hard drive won't
start. You'll be able to start your PC with the USB
drive, and fix problems by refreshing your PC or
performing advanced troubleshooting. And if your PC
comes with a hidden recovery partition, you'll even
have the option to remove it and reclaim disk space
once you've created the USB drive.
You will be also able to establish their own baseline
OS image via a command-line tool (recimg.exe). After
you've created the custom image, whenever you refresh
your PC, not only will you be able to keep your
personal data, settings, and Metro style apps, but you
can restore all the desktop apps in your custom image
as well. And if you buy a PC that already comes with a
recovery image on a hidden partition, you'll be able to
use the tool to switch from using the hidden partition
to instead use the custom image you?ve created. |
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