I was wondering, how do you go about backing up an entire PC? This is for a newly bought PC with no Windows Install CD. Basically my friend is buying a PC and doesn't want to pay the Geek Squad fee to make a backup of it. The goal would be to make a bootable CD/DVD that would take the PC back to how it was in Day 1 I guess. I don't know how these recovery programs work like Ghost and Acronis or whatever... The optimum recovery would be where the HDD can even be wiped and the recovery disc would restore the PC to factory settings, without the need to actually purchase the software to use it. I don't know what software can do this or what the exact term is. So, I want this done without the need of the recovery software to actually be installed on the PC or even needing to buy the software. Just a one time backup. Any help is much appreciated. At the moment I am playing around with Norton Ghost since it comes with a 30 day trial. I don't know how well it will work though, because I have 500GB of crap on it... I have a free partition on my PC that I can use for testing.
macrium reflect is a good free imaging software that works with xp/vista/7. All you need to do is a full backup of your hard drive, this will create a compress file that you can save on an external drive or another partition. It will also create what is called a "bootdisk cd" , you use this bootcd to bootup the computer then browse to where you stored your backup, next just restore the image backup you saved. Another free imaging software is driveimage xml, but you will have to create your own "bootup disk" (example bartpe or vistape and add the driveimage plugin) these bartpe/vistape are more reliable in booting up a computer. The only way you can save an image backup on one dvd is if your c: drive is very small. After installation my windows xp is less than 2gb compressed, but I'm not sure how large vista/7 are. If you will be relying on DVD media use only high quality disc (sony/verbatim). And some software will require you to swap dvd's in and out, that's why anything more than one dvd is not recommended. Most people store there images on external drives or different partitions.
I was playing around with my free partition and installed Windows 7 to do a test backup and saw that it's almost 12GB!!!! What the hell can take up so much space? What was Windows 98... Like 200MB? Thanks for the info you gave me. When booting the live CD, can I wipe whatever is on the HDD and replace it with the backed up image? I'm asking, because if a PC gets ultra infested, best bet is to wipe and do a clean install, but my friend's PC doesn't come with a Windows 7 DVD, so that's not an option. It kind of sounds like that is how you described Macrium, but I just want to make sure. Thanks again.
On all imaging software, when it restores an image it automatically formats the drive/partition that the new image will be installed on. When I've gotten infected I just restored over the original partition and nothing remained afterward. Macrium reflect has a good bootcd (linux based) that will bootup most computers. This software can only do the backup from inside windows (the bootcd only restores). Highly recommend that you get the "repair section" of the windows 7 installation disc. The neosmart website has that available for people who bought computers without the installation dvd. sometimes you need to run repairs following a failed restore. http://neosmart.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=9338883 Also get the free "paragon rescue kit 9.0 express" bootcd, also very useful when a restored drive won't boot. It's best to always plan for the worst case scenario. Image backup almost always works when you restore back to the same partition/hard drive but when you restore to a different drive sometimes you might run into problems. But most problems are quick fixes.
Thanks for all the help. I will get all the software you suggested. Now, I have to figure out how to use it and teach my friend Depending on how it works out, I may opt for a recovery method rather than reinstalling for myself. Reinstalling always takes around half an hour and although my PCs are virus free since I started using Firefox, sometimes they slow down over time from having too much crap installed.
