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Making a Restore Disk

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Cerial_Killer

Registered
Joined
Jul 18, 2001
When I bought this pc a long time ago, it came from Falcon-NW ( it was a low end gaming machine). Anyways it came with a system restore disk that Falcon-NW made for it. I used it once and worked great. It deleted everything and placed it back to its out of the box state ( all drivers installed, nothing to config).
Well now its a totally diff. pc and I want to make one of those cd's so When I have problems, I dont have to go through all the hasle of reformatting etc... The disk they gave me was 1 CD. Is there any way I can make one of those for my PC and what software do I need?

Thanks
 
Step 1. Set up your system exactly how you would like to have it restored to.
Step 2. Get some imaging software, like Norton Ghost, or DriveImage
Step 3. Take an image of your drive (using highest compression), and use any available options to burn a recovery CD. Make sure that the software makes the CD bootable.
Step 4. Test it. (be careful!) If all goes well, your system should be exactly the same. If something goes wrong, you'll probably have to reinstall your OS, and start over :-/

Some burning software comes with backup software.. you can try this, but I don't trust it as much as I do an exact image.
 
su root, what exactly do you mean by 'exact image'? Also, couldn't this 'exact image' be burned onto a CD/CDs using either a CD burning prog you have already, or the burning software that comes with the backup software?

Thanx,
-YB
 
I was thinking of doing this for a few clients that I have. But I had a question if I make the image bootable, the people won't need the driveimage software or anything right? That would involve buying way more software than I wanted to.
 
an 'exact image' would be a copy of your harddrive, byte for byte. That includes your boot record, etc. As opposed to copying all the files, restoring an exact image should put the system back to exactly the way it was.

Yes, the image can be burned to a CD, or multiple CDs.

The last time I did this was several versions ago. Since then, *I believe* norton put in a quick burner program in ghost to burn the CDs automatically for you. (not sure).

The bootable CD would boot the computer, have drivers for the cdrom, and a version of the imaging program, to extract the image.

AFAIK, you need licenses for each computer you plan to image. (When I did imaging, most of the images were created for me, and all of the licensing was taken care of through a site license of some sort)
 
su root said:
AFAIK, you need licenses for each computer you plan to image. (When I did imaging, most of the images were created for me, and all of the licensing was taken care of through a site license of some sort)

Thats exactly what I was wondering thanks. I have to find a way to do it legally without having to license each computer, that would cost me way too much money.
 
I did a bit of searching, but as far as I can tell, Drive Image doesn't have any licensing. (i may be wrong)

It does support burning CDs and DVDs though
 
Scenario - I just did a complete reformat, and I want to use my backup disk made by, lets say Norton Ghost, to restore everything on my harddrive. The operating system is not installed yet. W/out an OS would I even be able to boot from a cd-rom, considering there would be no CD-rom drivers? Is there some way around this?
 
youngbuck said:
Scenario - I just did a complete reformat, and I want to use my backup disk made by, lets say Norton Ghost, to restore everything on my harddrive. The operating system is not installed yet. W/out an OS would I even be able to boot from a cd-rom, considering there would be no CD-rom drivers? Is there some way around this?

Yup. It's done all the time. What happens is that you boot off the CDRom (as long as your computer supports it), and that installs the cdrom drivers. Also on the CD is the Program to extract/install the image, and the actual image.

You would boot, start the program, and tell it to write the image to your hard drive.
 
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