You can still go a head and do the repairs without the pre steps, but if there's anything wrong with the HDD then the repairs could hang.
Don't bother using the create a restore point option because for the main, it doesn't physically create a restore point, but the auto Registry Backup does.
That is still under investigation.
You can of course create your own manual restore point before proceeding with the repairs, but I prefer to create a system image onto external media.