Just wanted to start a little discussion about back-up software and imaging and such.
I've been playing with operating system configs and such and have managed to create a dual boot system with the use of selected software packages without any sighted help.
I am using two copies of xp at the moment and here's what I did.One piece of software that I am now embracing is casper, I formerly didn't care for it because it was window's only based, but since casper can now boot from usb devices, you can run windows from a thumb drive if you wish, then this makes it more valuable and also although I think traditional methods of restoring without windows being in the way are more secure and safer, ie, less likelihood of viruses and such being transferred, it's still nice to be able to restore partitions and such in windows only when desired.
Casper and the terrabyte unlimited products both ddos and windows versions, and an old copy of partition magic were my main tools of choice.
I did use ghost, and drive snapshot too, but the main disadvantage of ghost is that the dos side of things doesn't talk at all and your limited to batch files and knowing ahead of time where your drives are as you need the controller numbers and partition numbers to accomplish this.
But with image for dos from terrabyte you can restore interactively and with casper operating in only windows, if you have a second partition somewhere that's got a copy of your OS on it, you can restore to the version of the OS your not using currently. It's helpful to keep a copy of your boot.ini file in another location that has references to all your operating systems handy so you can restore that configuration on the fly after restoring a partition.
My only problem is that I can't seem to get a copy of windows which was installed on the first or only partition of a drive to boot from the second or third partition of a drive and I think this is an nt thing, 2k was even more picky about this sort of thing, but what I did was to partition my third drive in to several partitions it's a 300 gig drive, and each partition is now less that 120 gigs.
When in dos it seems with sata drives you have to keep some factors in mind, files larger that 2gb or partitions that are too large or have too many files on them won't get read properly and you can't restore.
I was having this problem with image for dos until I made smaller partitions and now things work well.
Image for windows will also resize partitions on the fly, some of these backup softwares expect to have the same size drive or partition to restore to and will puke if they don't see that.
That's the way drive snapshot is, at least with fat32 partitions.I like to use fat32 for all the obvious reasons, at least on system drives, I keep some ntfs partitions for large ISO files and other things, but if you ever have a drive problem fat32 is much easier to deal with.
So because drive snapshot has problems with resizing images, I'm converting all my images to ghost or terra byte images.
So far if I had to tchose the two products I'd use exclusively, it's be the terrabyte atuff for flexibility and accessibility and casper for the window's only aspect and ease of use for the non-technical person or command line challenged individual.
But casper's partitioning and drive c onfiguration facilities aren't as advanced as even the old partition magic so you really need a couple of different tools.
So I have my operating systems on a loan partition on my c drive which is drive 0 in the bios, and the first partition of drive 1
which is the way it shows up in dos or the bios.Of course windows changes things around so it's important to check depending on whether your in dos or windows to make sure what's refering to what.
A couple of good ways to help are making sure you always give your drives meaningful volume labels and observing the size of the partitions or drives. What I did was to put an early unclutered installation of my studio machine on the first partition of the second drive and leave the hither to system drive alone, I didn't re-partition it because remember, some of this drive software expects to see the same size partition that was backed up when it restores, so until I get these images re-sized, I'm playing it safe.
So we have gwo default places to back up or restore images to and from and we can do so in windows or in dos.
I'm going to make a small partition on my third drive and make it the first partition and see if I can get a third os to boot.
Right now according to the best information I have,there are issues with the boot configurations with vista and windows 7 which make it hard to back up properly since microslop changes the way in which things boot and one has to adjust the boot record to make these new operating systems boot properly when one deploys an images or such, and I'm not properly using w7 yet, but we'll be nailing these issues down soon I hope.
Anyway, that's some of what we've been doing after christmas here at the studio.
So if you don't want to have to install from scratch a complete operating system, you can use a copy of the one you already have installed if you put it on the same place on another drive in regards to partition position.
There's probably a way to fix or change this in a boot record. I bet DJX knows some real nuggets about this sort of thing 'grin'.But anyone feel free to chime in with experiences because we all need to keep our machines fresh and well oiled to make all that great music and also to do daily things, and I'm a bad boy, I swore I wouldn't do anything else with this machine but studio things, but it's just too
atractive to use your fastest machine in the house to do everything, so one needs to learn to manage those dangerous habbits 'grin'.
