How do I backup my ENTIRE laptop drive?

[chottoED]

Preferrably to CDR/W since I've got a combo drive...
I'm running WinXP btw.

[DocSilly]

You could use Ghost, it supports ghosting to CD burners though I haven't tried it yet.

[FlyingPenguin]

Norton Ghost is what I use. Ghost lets you make a boot floppy with CD-R drivers on it (Ghost must be run from DOS to make a drive image if run under Win2K or XP) and you can make an ISO image of the entire drive or selected partitions. It's compressed at 2:1 so you can usually get nearly 1.3Gb on a CD and Ghost automatically spans CDs.

Another program is Power Quest's Disk Image 5.0 which unlike Ghost works from within WindowsXP, but I've never used it. I use Ghost.

[chottoED]

my biggest problem w/ all this is the fact that my lappy has no floppy...

[DocSilly]

You could create a bootable CD with Ghost on it and the necrssary files ... assuming your lappy supports boot from CD ...

[chottoED]

the problem w/ that is inorder to create the bootable cd.. i'd have to have a floppy containing the boot drivers...

so, i try ghosting w/o making that bootable cd... NO GO... it starts burning and 1/4 way thru the disc, it bombs...


tried using drive image... NO GO... it sez it can't automatically reboot into DOS Drive Image to start the process and i need to use the recovery floppies...


anymore suggestions guys?

[DocSilly]

Why don't ya get a bootfloppy image (with the necessary files) from http://www.bootdisk.com , unzip it and then point your burning program to that location instead to a floppy ?

[chottoED]

yeah but the thing is, i still can't get ghost to work properly...
it boots fine and starts teh burn, but it bombs out in the process of burning