How to re-image windows on a a machine with single drive/hard

Question

I'd like to purchase a Lenovo W541 laptop, but I have an issue with the way Lenovo changed their way of having HDD.

On my current laptop I have two partitions/HDD, one for system files and one for my data. Whenever something goes wrong with OS, I re-image the entire system partition in 3 minute while my data are untouched on the other drive. However, it seems that it is not possible to have two HDDs in Lenovo W541. Also it is not recommended to have more than one partition in a SSD hard drive.

If my machine has only one partition on its single HDD, this means that if I need to reinstall the operating system, I must first copy all of my data to an external hard drive, then re-image the partition, then return all of the data back to the drive. This is not an efficient solution and takes lots of time.

I am wondering if there is a more efficient solution for this? I appreciate any comment.

Answer 1

You can use programs such as Acronis (from within Windows) to make snapshots of a partition (incrementally if you want it completed in minutes) which are just large files. You can then store them on another partition, or an external drive, then you can revert back to an earlier snapshot if required. The interface of these programs makes them very easy to use.

If you don't mind a free but harder to use way you can also take images of a partition outside of Windows by booting into the Clonezilla Live CD and store the images on external drives or other partitions on your main hard drive.