The only time in recent years that I've done a recovery in anger, was for a friend who'd lost her entire photo collection. So without any form of backups was she, that I booted in Ubuntu and only after hours of slow copying to DVDs tried MY recovery discs for my Sony's Vista boot. (dual boot with W7)
To my astonishment, it worked. It took several minutes, but then her machine, was as far as I could see, completely back to square one. If I'd gambled with her three years of photos, I could have saved a day.
I still have this Asus shard of metal with no DVD. I've been distracted, but need to get a workable system with full recovery available by the time I leave for the UK. I have taken off all internal recovery since the Solid State disc was only left with 67gig. I've copied W8.1 to a USB stick for a clean reinstall but I'd really like to recovery everything working as in the case above. Is it cast in stone that I'll have to have a USB DVD with me at all times? The thing is, will it work without drivers?