Program able to make bootable dvd of system?
Could someone recommend a good (and preferably free) program that would backup the entire system hdd with xp and all installed programs, and then be able to put it on a bootable dvd, reinstalling the lot again.
I usually format the hdd and reinstall xp every half a year and it is always a painful process taking days before all programs i need is installed again.
I usually format the hdd and reinstall xp every half a year and it is always a painful process taking days before all programs i need is installed again.
Post edited by MinerWilly on
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/Pedro
Firstly, an entire hard drive won't fit on a DVD. Not a show stopper, but still a pain.
Secondly, if you used one of these DVD's to create a new machine, all of the installed drivers would be wrong, so you still have the hassle of installing drivers, and the probability of system crashes as windows tries to use the wrong ones.
Thirdly, there must be something very, very wrong with your system if you have to keep on re-installing the OS. I have NEVER had to do any restore once the OS is installed. And I have machines here several years old!
All my machines base HD's will fit easily on a single DVD. We are talking about the base OS, drivers and essential programs. All the space is used up by data and occasional programs which I don't reinstall off the DVD.
I thought the idea was to have the DVD customised to each machine. I have one restore DVD for each machine not one DVD for all my machines. The data is backed up elsewhere.
My general desktop machine and work laptop get cleared about every 3 months. The reason is simple, they are used a lot for experiments and acquire a lot of crud or programs required only for a single job. My specialised machines (e.g. webserver, firewall etc) get set up and then run for years without being touched. When the uninstall feature actually works and doesn't leave vast amounts of crud around then I won't have to keep reinstalling the OS to keep it working with anything like decent performance.
If you are having to reinstall because you are trialling software a lot that makes a mess of the machine, consider using a Virtual Machine solution for testing instead. Frequent re-installs haven't been necessary since the dark old days of Windows 95
You can make a live CD for XP quite easily, I carry one round at work all the time for "rescue" missions. A live USB stick is classed as essential. You do however have a lot of problems with drivers. Being as your normally only trying to get data off or replace a couple of deleted files you can live with 640 x 480 or 800 x 640 display and most of the hardware not working. Normally its a case of boot the machine from the CD or USB and dump the HD to an external drive to work on later for data or copy the essential missing files from i386 to get the original machine to boot.
I use it most of the time the same way as a DOS boot disk or Hirons / Bart PE disk. Bog all use except in an emergency.
Also on my Eee I can boot into XP off the SD card (xandros on the SSD) but in both cases its not really what you want to do unless you have time on your hands to waste.
Thanks! I looked into this a little and it seems to be able to do the job. Norton Ghost works a little in the same way, backs up to a file and uses a bootdisk to restore. Only this is free and Norton is not! :D
Symantec Ghost is a commercial alternative. But if you are going to pay for it, get Acronis Trueimage instead. It boots from a cd and you can backup and restore from both local and network storage, while supporting quite a lot of hardware Ghost didn't. Trueimage was miles ahead when I compared alternatives a couple years ago.
/Pedro
If it's a newly formatted machine, with just the OS and the necessary add-ons (WinRAR, WinAMP, Nero, etc) then provided the back up program compresses the data (surely they all do) then it's fine. Plus he might have a (relatively) small boot partition, in which case the problem might well not exist. I used to have a 4GB partition when I used my old Win98 laptop, and that was of course capable of fitting on a DVD no problem. I even ran XP from a 4GB partition for the same reason on that drive, although I did have to install a lot of utilities to the other partition as XP uses up a lot of the 4GB space by itself.
All true, but you never know what the future holds. If you have a serious malware infection on your drive, it can be much simpler to simply restore the total drive C: backup (if you have one). Or if your hard drive dies, replace it with another, partition it the same as the old one, and restore the back up. Or it Windows gets corrupt, just restore it.
I used Norton Ghost to back up my C: partition, and I several times over the years restored the backups I had made, to fix malware or corruption or whatever. Plus doing so every few months kept Windows "fresh" and prevented a lot of the slowdown that Windows developes over time.
This period covered two laptops, and my desktop PC (which has evolved through motherboards, graphics and other cards, etc, and each time I changed some hardware that had it's own low level drivers then I formatted and reinstalled everything and made a new C: partition image) and probably saved me a lot of trouble. I don't use Norton Ghost anymore, as the version I had (which is for DOS, I had to boot up with a DOS boot disc with a CD driver installed, to read the image file from the CD I'd written it to) did or didn't do something that I wanted/needed/didn't want/didn't need (I can't remember), so now I use a Windows program that does the same job - Acronis True Image, and it does what I want. I haven't compared different products though (True Image was the first one I tried, and it worked to I've stuck with it), so there might be much better programs available for the PC.
And I have made bootable DVDs for my two PCs (desktop and laptop) using True Image, but I can't remember if True Image did this, or if I did it (by backing up the C: drive image to another partition then using NERO to burn the partition to a bootable DVD and also putting True Image on it.
If you do decide to use a program like True Image, then you should really:
- Have a (relatively) small C: partition, say 6GB to 10GB, so that compressed it will fit onto a DVD. If you do that, then you'll have to get used to installing large programs and utilities onto partitions other than C:, and also move your swap file onto a partition other than C: (and also tell all programs (WinRAR, DVD Decrypter, etc) to use a partition other than C: for temporary files.
- Preferably format the C: partition and start from scratch. This way, there is no wasted space or unused files on your C: drive. If you do do this, then it's probably best to backup the C: drive at different stages, say; first time when Windows is installed but nothing else, second time after Windows and then all drivers are installed, third when Windows and alll drivers and all the utilities on C: that you think you'll need are installed. This way, if you change something like say your graphics card, you can go back to the second image, and start again with a clean system. It's not necessary to do this, but if you do then it can help avoid problems. You can safely just format, then install Windows + all drivers + all utilities and then do a backup, it's up to you.
- After you've made a backup, be certain to verify the backup (using the same program, it should have a verify option), as you don't want to find, when you need the backup, that it's corrupt and non-working.
I hope that helps.
Acronis trueimage seems a very competent program, and it won?t probably rely so much on windows components to run. DriveImage XML uses Microsoft's Volume Shadow Services (VSS), this is stuff i usually cut out from the xp install disk using nlite before installing. But, it?s still free...
I got Acronis True Image and must say i?m extremly pleased with it. It does exactly what i wanted. It creates an image of the system with all installed programs, this image is then placed on another harddisk and can be restored by running True Image from xp or by running the True Image boot and restore disk.
It compresses the image a little too, so with xp and the most important programs installed the image is only a little over 1gig.