image of windows and installed softwares
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I use Acronis True Image and make daily backups of my setup - I have XP on C: partition - all installed Programs on D: partition - and balance stuff not needing daily backups on E: . Acronis backs up these 10gb partitions of C: and D: in under 2 minutes to another HDD.
This means that when I need to restore an image because of a problem in XP I have to Restore only the XP setup on the C: partition and all my Programs and DATA on D: does not get affected. I have been doing this for years.
This means that when I need to restore an image because of a problem in XP I have to Restore only the XP setup on the C: partition and all my Programs and DATA on D: does not get affected. I have been doing this for years.
@Eazy
need some help here .. I just need to create an image of my C: drive on a dvd .. my C: is usually around 6 gb filled and has all the programs n stuff. I wanna know if it will fit on one dvd and can I instead of reinstalling windows just use Acronis True Image to format n restore the image as my C: incase of any probs.
Actually what the prob is I am tired of reisntalling Windows and all the software n updates n settings along with it .. I want to make an image of my c: soon after a fresh install of XP with all my progs n settings .. So the next time my system crashes I want to able to restore C: from the acronis image and have a clean reinstall without actually reinstalling all the stuff .. IS this possible ? And will I be able to format the existing C: before restoring from the image ?? I dont want to simply overwrite it.
thanks.
need some help here .. I just need to create an image of my C: drive on a dvd .. my C: is usually around 6 gb filled and has all the programs n stuff. I wanna know if it will fit on one dvd and can I instead of reinstalling windows just use Acronis True Image to format n restore the image as my C: incase of any probs.
Actually what the prob is I am tired of reisntalling Windows and all the software n updates n settings along with it .. I want to make an image of my c: soon after a fresh install of XP with all my progs n settings .. So the next time my system crashes I want to able to restore C: from the acronis image and have a clean reinstall without actually reinstalling all the stuff .. IS this possible ? And will I be able to format the existing C: before restoring from the image ?? I dont want to simply overwrite it.
thanks.
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mohit said:
Make an image of 6 GB will take around 3 GB - depending on files on HDD as files already compressed like zip and mp3 [or whatever] dont compress much. If you do this directly from HDD to DVD writer it will take quite long - so what I would suggest is that you use an external USB HDD and backup your images to that drive. You can ask the program to cut the backup image into selected file sizes so you can write them to CDR/DVDRs later. I do my backups from one HDD to another one when both are attached to the MoBo - this is quite fast.
Acronis will run from XP or from a bootable CD/DVD - I use it to Restore often and "IT ALWAYS FORMATS THE HDD WHILST RESTORING" - but it has an option to open the backup image file and you see all the files and directories like you do in Windows Explorer - from this you can select any number of files or directories and Restore selected stuff only. VERY GOOD for restoring only corrupted files or getting back files accidently deleted.
I have not reinstalled XP since I first installed it - I only restore images which works fine.
One thing to know about most Backup programs they dont like it if you restore a partition to a full HDD or vice versa. I have found a way around this - run "fdisk /mbr" but only from a bootable win98se floppy or cdr - no other OS's fdisk will get past this problem - ONLY WIN98SE.
Acronis has saved my XP setup many many times !! :clap:
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mohit said:
A 200 GB hard disk can be run with a single 200 GB partition or have smaller partitions of - lets say 4 of 50 GB each - so if you have a single partition HDD of 200 GB with 30 GB data and you Restore an image of that HDD to a partition on the other drive which means you would use only 30 GB of that HDD first partition of 50 GB ... this looks fine but Windows will not run from that partition untill you run fdisk /mbr as I mentioned in my other post. Neither will Windows run if you take an image of the 50GB partition and restore it to the other HDD which is one partition of 200 GB - this looks like it should not have a problem but Windows does not run.
Also if you change a setup from a SATA to a PATA HDD and restore an image made from either one to the other - same problem - same solution. I do this very often - change from a 250 GB PATA to a 160 GB SATA - same XP installation restored.
If I have not been clear just ask again
mohit said:
OF course it will work ....
what I have been saying is that if you decide to restore the image to ANOTHER HDD which does not have partitions then only you will run into problems. If you are not going to restore the image to another HDD then you can ignore all my ramblings.....
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