You should have gotten a software disk with it. If you have one of the "My Books" the backup software is EMC Retrospect Express. Using the manufacturers back up software is usually the best, unless you have a Maxtor hard drive in the tower - the Maxtor is my favorite back up program. Keep in mind that even though you are backing up to the external, it could go bad. If that happens you could lose everything.

Owbist, thanks I do like the fast boot on W8 - even with the switch to Desk Top, which to my simple needs is like being back in W7, it is a much shorter wait to start browsing or getting email. Mikie, not sure I "know and love" playing with the BIOS, but in the past I have had occasions to need to. Mostly that goes back to W95 days. Or even the 3.x whatever was before '95. You seem to be suggesting a 3rd party recovery tool. As I noted Gateway provides a tool to image the HDD as well as restore to factory fresh - as I have already uninstalled Norton I assume that would be Factory Fresh less Norton which is fine with me. What I miss was W7 had a DVD boot capability and Toshiba provided me with the tools to create a repair DVD, separate from a restore DVD... I liked that, it prevented me form doing damage by clicking on the wrong button. I suppose the Gateway restore doesn't proved direct access to F8. I do recall tapping F8 during a boot in XP and earlier to get into the BIOS..you seem to be saying (to my reading) that W8 doesn't let one get to the BIOS until the password is satisfied. I don't know if that is different in W7, I have never gone to the BIOS in my W7 machines. I have had to boot the Toshiba notebook off of the Repair DVD a couple of times and it saved my "bacon". On Password, in W7 I could easily change or remove the password.. that seems to be buried deeper in W8. Is it even possible to run W8 without an administrative password protected logon? My giant 17.3" Gateway will likely not be taken out of the house, a password isn't needed - well if a crook breaks into my house it would be better if I has some protection on all computers... problem is W8 ended up with a very complicated password that resulted from my initial start up of the machine..as I recall it had something to do with a password for my Microsoft account, and being external I wanted a secure PW, in fact MS may have required it.

System Restore is usually from your "C:\System Volume Information" a hidden folder by default. Sounds like your D has the OEM install files on it.. to revert your computer hard drive back to Out of the Box new condition. If you didn't delete any of it :) .... An image of your C drive made by a program like Macrium will usually compress to about half the total used bytes that that drive shows as currently used in windows. Usually too big to image to DVD's unless you don't mind spending the time it would take to do,,, and of course the cost of several DVD's. My C drive is small compared to most peoples on win7 and shows 60gb used .. divided by about 4.7gb per DVD.. thats a lot of DVD's and lots of time sitting there changing those disks. fwiw Paid about $11 delivered from newegg for a usb hard drive enclosure and stuck an old laptop hard drive in it & use that here to save system images to weekly. Think DVD-R's cost me about $0.40 each in a pack of 50 including tax from Office Depot.

I preach back up all the time and I have to say I wish I did it as much as I preach it LOL I have not had a loss of needed data however, knock on wood! I do have Acronis also, I do have online storage, I do have external usb hard drives, I have a lot of the really important stuff saved too, I have flash drives for each pc with all my essentials saved and I re-do those from time to time. One pc does not have a recovery partition or dvds and I have not imaged it yet, bad bad bad! I have saved the data to back up, but not my OS image. The new acer laptop apparently does have some type of recovery program or partition, have not messed with that yet, it also needs to be imaged. But I have little to nothing on it at this point so no data to lose there. I only use web based email nothing is on my pc. I know from my personal experience talking to LOTS of people about computers over 90% of them have no form of backup, and most have no idea what a partition is. In addition they think if there is a problem with the computer it is not fixable and they go out and buy an entirely new computer. When they could have simply reformatted the pc. I wish I could be the one getting all those computers that are being thrown out! I have a personal friend that has gone through about 5 computers to my one and the reason why is well it would not work right so it had to be replaced! I have told them about backing up I have told them about recovery and reformatting, I have sent them links to FREE security programs to put on the pc and run, it does not matter. We can only try to teach...