I'm guessing you mean ISO not IOS. The only free upgrade path at the moment is to update though the store. Going that route, it will be unlikely that you will be given an option to download and save an ISO or any install files. From what I have read, if you want an actual ISO you'll have to pay for it by buying a license for 8.1. Other than that the only other official route is though TechNet or MSDN subscriptions.
Indications are, that that is the way its going to go for a lot of people. We won't know for sure until it actually becomes available though. I have access to TechNet so its a non issue for me. It kind of sucks for the average Joe, especially if you have multiple PC's to update.
Doe's that mean relying on a recovery drive? I have just made one for my first of three W 8.1 upgrades and it's only 282MB. Will it be necessary to make a separate recovery drive for each pc with 8.1 on it?
The Recovery thumb drive for my laptop was 16 GB. That was for the factory installed Windows 8 using the "copy the contents of the recovery partition to the thumb drive" option. 282 MB sounds awful small?
I've just made another recovery drive on the second pc with W8.1. At least 512mb must be available, and 283 mb was used. Check out: Control panel---Recovery---Create a recovery drive. An option which is greyed out is "copy the recovery partition from the pc to the recovery drive".
I've just made another recovery drive on the second pc with W8.1. At least 512mb must be available, and 283 mb was used. Check out: Control panel---Recovery---Create a recovery drive. An option which is greyed out is "copy the recovery partition from the pc to the recovery drive".
Factory installed OEM versions, upgrades, or clean installs? That option is greyed out on my desktop, its a clean install and doesn't have a recovery partition. My laptop had two recovery partitions, one was the factory installed partition used to do the factory restore. That was the one copied to the thumb drive and why I needed that big of a drive. A 283 MB recovery drive will not be able to restore your system by itself, its going to look for an image to restore from. I wouldn't depend on that alone to bail you out if something happens.
All of my W8's were upgrades from XP, the cheap ones. I suspected that such a small recovery drive was as much use as a chocolate teapot and as Microsoft seem reluctant to allow ISO's of 8.1 it could be a long road to recovery.
. You can fix some issues with that drive but its functionality is limited.