What would image tool would you recommend for Hard drive data backups

hamster

Hi All, I need a bit of advice on this one...

I am doing a reinstall for the umpteen time. Is there a utility that can allow me to take a "snapshot" of a fresh reinstall of say windows XP with all my drivers and basic utils installed at that point and burn it onto a 4.38Gb DVD-R ? The idea is to start from there the next time I do a reinstall.

Ideally would be a tool like Norton Ghost? I searched up a few freeware utils like Imagemapper but I don't know how reliable these would be.

Asok

hamster wrote:

Hi All, I need a bit of advice on this one...

I am doing a reinstall for the umpteen time. Is there a utility that can allow me to take a "snapshot" of a fresh reinstall of say windows XP with all my drivers and basic utils installed at that point and burn it onto a 4.38Gb DVD-R ? The idea is to start from there the next time I do a reinstall.

Ideally would be a tool like Norton Ghost? I searched up a few freeware utils like Imagemapper but I don't know how reliable these would be.

Well if you have a spare hard drive to temporarily dump the image to, Hirens boot cd comes with ghost 8.0 on it. If you need help finding the image of hirens let us know.

beaker

Asok wrote:

Well if you have a spare hard drive to temporarily dump the image to, Hirens boot cd comes with ghost 8.0 on it.

I am very interested in this as well.

Could you give us an idea of how that would work?

Could the other drive be on another PC on a network?

Standard Toaster

Norton Ghost is your man. I got it with my external hdd. You can backup an image of hdd, with compression if you like, and save onto a hdd, dvdr of through usb/firewire.
I'm not aware of any freeware utilities.

Asok

well it would be ideal if it was in the same machine, all you have to do is download "Hirens Boot CD" I can probably find you a link and then burn it to cd, Don't worry its only a 25mb iso then you have the two hard drives in the machine and just reboot the machine.

Ensure you have the cd in and boot from it.
Then just choose start boot cd (Option 2)
Then 2 For Disk Clone Utilities
Then 2 for norton ghost 8.0
Select local - disk to image - then select the source drive aka the one you have installed xp onto then just look for the other drive on the list and save the image onto it. then when all is done take out the cd and reboot then bam you will see the image and its parts in .gho format wherever you saved them.

Then to put it back just do all the above and choose from image and you will have the machine back to the way it was when you first ghosted it.

hamster

Asok wrote:

well it would be ideal if it was in the same machine, all you have to do is download "Hirens Boot CD" I can probably find you a link and then burn it to cd, Don't worry its only a 25mb iso then you have the two hard drives in the machine and just reboot the machine.

Ensure you have the cd in and boot from it.
Then just choose start boot cd (Option 2)
Then 2 For Disk Clone Utilities
Then 2 for norton ghost 8.0
Select local - disk to image - then select the source drive aka the one you have installed xp onto then just look for the other drive on the list and save the image onto it. then when all is done take out the cd and reboot then bam you will see the image and its parts in .gho format wherever you saved them.

Then to put it back just do all the above and choose from image and you will have the machine back to the way it was when you first ghosted it.

Hi Asof,

thanks for mentioning Hirens Boot CD... it's reminds me of the Ultimate Boot CD 3.3.

Going over your steps... this means taking an image of the entire drive? or can you decide to take a single partition from it? What if you a 30Gb active main NTFS partition and there was 4Gb of winxp/utils installed data on it... would the .gho file be 4Gb or 30Gb? Maybe would be compressible and shrink to fix on a DVD? ie, ideally restore from that in future.

Actually from an earlier install I noted (before service pack 2 and my utils)
* After Install, 2.21Gb of disk space is used up.
* 8,709 files and 1,197 directories using up 1,079,275,566 (1Gb)

It would ideal to capture this and restore to a formatted active partition...

R-Drive Image for example creates a special bootable CD disc or diskettes to restore system partitions.

hamster

A further note here. I gave Hirens Boot CD a quick go. Two issues with it. It failed to detected my standard IDE CDROM drive. I got around that when it offered to use USB drivers. Next after entering Norton Ghost 8.0, I selected my partition to backup and to where... but when I clicked start it exited back to freedos 7.1 stating that command.com not loaded. Strange since the freedos7.1 environment is set up by the CD. Oh well...

I must try Ultimate Boot CD 3.3 which I got earlier during the week. It has a few backup tools on it which I have yet to check out.

Capt'n Midnight

GHOST has a per PC license (or maybe a time limited demo too)
You could use NTBACKUP - then do a clean install and restore the old backup - slow but works even if the original drive has bad sectors.

partimage on the knoppix and many other linux cd's is good too - not as snazzy as ghost but the price is right and you can do it acrosss a network using a bootable cd - no screwdrivers needed.

SparrowHawk

I've used Norton Ghost 9.0 for about 1 year now - does what it says on the tin - I had to do one full restore & everything was as it should be!

SH