Is this possible?

I'm getting sick and tired of having to reinstall windows, along with a bunch of apps, every time something breaks (which seems to be a lot around here). Can I just install a fresh copy of windows, a few apps (norton and such) and drivers, then just copy the HD, bit for bit, onto a DVD (or two) so that if I ever need to reinstall windows, I can just format the HD, then copy the DVD onto the HD instead?

Very possible, I do it all the time I can get a full windows install with all my apps and games onto one DVD using Acronis True Image. Gives me a boot disk CD and an Image disk DVD.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

You can do this with Ghost also, but I have used both and prefer Acronis

Very cool, I'll check it out.

So if I do a windows install on my E: drive (which is currently blank; I want to start from scratch), can I then use acronis on that and use that on any computer? will anything be messed up cause its not installed on my primary HD? The manual (yes, I read the manual ) says something about using sysprep...is that nessicarry?

[EDIT] When I load the boot disk and try to run the recovery, it says something about not being able to use certain drives (something about Windows Dynamic drives and EZ-Drives), then it doesn't continue. Does it not like my SATA drive or something? [/EDIT]

If you want to restore the image to other then the exact config of the image drive you are most likely going to have problems. You can not image a boot drive on C: and image that over to E:, with C: still in the chain without issues. If you pull C: and E: and replace and jump E: into the C: position then E: is now C: (Got that?)

I run my image and restore on a sata and a sata hot tray with no problems. You can not use it on dynamic disks. Do you know if you have dynamic disks? http://www.petri.co.il/difference_between_basic_and_dynamic_disks_in_windows_xp_2000_2003.htm

EZ disks-which I guess is referring to the EZ bios utility which is a drive overlay program. But really I don't know what they mean by that.

If you have the software licenses for more then one system then yes you can image over to several identical computers (lic.x) using your boot and restore image.


The way I use it is do my install, load my stuff/tweak/configure then build an image then burn it to DVD using UDF. Then when I need I just write over the original disk.

I didn't quite get that...

My drive config looks like this:
Drive 1 (250 GB): C: (primary), E: (logical) (Both FAT32)
Drive 2 (120 GB): D: (primary) (NTFS)
No RAID or anything.

The reason I split it like that was cause I wanted XP and XP x64 on two phisically seperate drives, then an extra partition with no OS for backups and extra storage.

So you need idendical computers to use the image on more than one machine?

I'm not really sure why you are having those problems with your setup. I cant see any reason. Give acronis a call, or play around, dig into the FAQs, etc. There may be an expert here to chime in, for me, my use, it all works fine.

As far as needing an exactly identical computer to restore to, no it would not be a requirement, but if the hardware changes detected are severe you may have real problems, and in most cases will need to reactivate windows. You could use sysprep here but IMHO its a few extra steps. Its just the same as pulling a drive loaded up with XP and sticking that drive in another system, same results. Sysprep would really be necessary to change the config info mainly so that you would not have networking issues.