[ddots-l] Re: O.T. System Restore?
- From: "Jayson Smith" <ratguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:25:09 -0400
Hi,
I've found a free, open-source utility which is good for this. It's
called Self Image, and the URL is http://selfimage.excelcia.org
You have to fiddle around with the Jaws curser a bit, but it's
completely accessible. It works under XP, and it's a disk imaging program.
You can go from disk to file, or from file to disk. The one time I tried a
direct disk to disk copy, it crashed. For imaging partitions with more than
4GB of data, you need to insure the destination filesystem is NTFS, since
FAT32 has a 4GB limit on the size of any one file.
You can save an image of any partition to another disk, or possibly
even another partition on the same drive, although that wouldn't do you a
bit of good if that drive stopped working. If you are a Linux geek like I
am, you can mount the images this program creates as a filesystem and read
data. I have no idea about adding new data. Self Image doesn't actually have
any facility for restoring individual files, adding new material to an
image, etc. Basically, what I do is to keep several images of my system
available, going back for many months. The program can compress the image as
it's being created, which can save a lot of space.
When it's time to restore, you can restore even to a partition that's
mounted under Windows, but not if it has any open files. Obviously, you
can't restore to the partition from which you're booting, since Windows
wouldn't like that very much. This presents a little problem. However, if
the drive is working, but you just need to restore to an earlier point in
time to undo corruption, etc. you can put that drive in a USB enclosure and
put in another drive, and install XP and Self Image on that disk, install
just enough to get a working XP system up and running. Then do the restore
to the original drive, then pop that back in and you should be good to go.
If you're starting out with a new drive anyway, it might be worth making a
second partition and installing XP to that, as a rescue partition from which
you can restore your main system. There's also an emergency boot CD which
includes Self Image, but I would assume that to be totally inaccessible,
since no screen reader is included. Hope this helps.
Jayson
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Gibbs" <kevjazz@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 12:22 AM
Subject: [ddots-l] O.T. System Restore?
I'm in the process of giving away old XP computers. I completely wiped them
and then reinstalled the original factory software thanks to some restore
disks that came with the machines way back when. All this inspires me to
learn about system restore points and creating a complete backup of my
system that could be restored in the event of a complete wipe out.
First of all, I do know that I've created one irreversible problem
with one of my machines. The factory restore disks never knew about the
second hard drive I had added to the machine by the dealer. That means that
the "restored" machine doesn't know that there's a second hard drive in the
machine. Is there anything I can do to fix that assuming that I can't find
the installation disks that came with the added drive?
Next, I want to create this rebuildable thing in the event that I
lose my entire system. What do I have to do to have a fire wire drive
capable of restoring my completely wiped two drive machine to the condition
it was on a given day. This should include both Windows and ALL, that's A L
L the projects and files that were on the machine on this mythical day.
Last, how would I add individual projects and files to the restore
drive so that the update brings me to a day forward of that on which the
original update/restore point was created?
Would Ghost be the way to go?
Thanks,
Kevin
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