PCA Forums

Is there a way to create a system restore disk? I am building a new system & would like to be
able to restore in the future if needed. I am talkin about a restore disk similar to HP products,
Dell, etc. Any suggestions?? Thanks

You could try Norton Ghost, most here would suggest that.. It wouldn't be an "install" disc, but it would completely restore your computer to what it was like at the time you made the back up. Just a thought..

And if nobody's done it, Welcome to PCA!

Norton Ghost is your friend. You can use it to make a CD or DVD "image" of your entire hard drive (or just the boot partition which is simpler).

As an IT professional, I don't work on any mission critical system until I Ghost it first (in my case I carry around an 80Gb drive for making images of client drives).

FP,
Did I do something wrong with ghost images?

I had a new drive I installed 2k on and all updates, spks ect, then I did a ghost image of that drive.
Then I restored that image to another freshly formated drive. I bought home the drives and tried to install those into the wifes system, none of them will boot! They give me an error message something not found I think, or they get to the black windows screen with the white scroll bar at the bottom, bar completes all the way across but nothing ever happens beyond that!

Basically what I was trying to do was install 2k on my wifes system. I had a lan connection to the ISP servers at the office to do windows updates. So I figured I would intall 2k on the drives there on my test system, then bring the drive home and install in the wifes system and install drivers for all her stuff.
Then after I get everything transferred from the existing drive and all programs installed and working I was going to reformat her 8gig drive and mount it in a external case so I can move large files back and forth. Still a 3k connetion at home, but office has about 100 lan connection, the net is slower than my connect speed

But anyway, the drives work at the office in the test system, a Biostar with AMD 2000xp, but won't work at home in her Biostar with 1700xp system. But when I took the drives back to the office they boot fine again!
Not the same system boards, but both are biostars. I have set the jumpers correctly. I double checked that, and no drive boots at home but all boot at the office set as master only.

Her system is runing 98se, so I can't see the drives anyway if I set them to slave because I did them as NTFS drives.

Is 2k somehow writing something into bios settings or other parts of the System board?

Oh yea, her system is fine otherwise. Win 98se is getting gunked up abit with net stuff and old files, and I wanted to move her up to a larger drive. SO I figure I'd install an 80gig for her and a fresh 2k install.

You can't transport a Win2K install to another system - won't work. You can do it with WinXP but you have to do a repair install before it'll work properly (and that undoes any critical updates).

2K and XP both find the hard drive using the physical address of the drive (unlike Win9x) so if you put it in a different mobo it won't find the hard drive after the initial bootstrap (because the address will be different on different hardware) and you'll get a BSOD saying something like "can't find partition".

Only way it would work is if they were identical mobos, or at least used the same chipset.

Gee ain't M$ nice.
So this means anytime I move a drive I screw it up? Fry/swap a system board etc..? No way around that?? No off the wall third party software to re-write a M$ file to recognize the new address?

If I do a fresh install on a new drive in the system it will stay in, then restore a ghost image of W2k or XP over that, will that screw the drive up again or would it then work correctly? I could ghost with all patches and fixes installed already for future restores. That was like the main reason I got ghost! To use one image for back up, then restore that to any system needing fixed or fresh install later. I've got more than enough keys (legal) so that's not the problem. Heck I got 2 or 3 XP homes not even opened yet.

I suppose if I have to I can use part of my main system as a tech system and install the pre-install software and all fixes patches and service packs for future use, but I think even that might leave me out cold for swapping drives around! I think the pre-install might only work with blank drives and fresh format and installs since it's for oem use!

Anyway, glad I found this out now! I was going to buy some of those drive swapping bay units and install everything I need onto one hardrive, then take that back and forth to use as a boot drive at home and at the office! One drive with all my paid for software on it, but used in several computers at different times. I'll have to figure something else out for that now! I often need the same setup both places, (but I can only be one place at a time), any suggestions.

I was going to try the multie configed options, config1 at home, config2 at office, for hardware and driver differences. I geuss 2k and XP still have that? But for now I geuss it doesn't really matter if the OS won't boot anyway!

If you restore an image to the same system it was made on (doesn't have to be the same drive, just the same controller) there's no issues. For instance if you make a backup image and your drive crashes, you go out and buy a bigger drive and restore the backup, that'll work fine.

There's also no problem restoring a WinXP image to a different computer, as long as you do a repair install afterwards (also keep in mind that XP will likely require re-activation because of the change in hardware).

2K doesn't have XP's repair install feature, and has very limited ability to adapt to a change of mobo (unless it's a mobo with the same chipset).

It's nothing to pick on MS for. You could get away with that in 98 because it wasn't a real OS. NT based operating systems are real OSes and as such address the hardware by it's address (98 is just a shell running in DOS). You'd probably have similar problems with Linux.

there is a way to make 2k somewhat portable whic is to run the hd through a pci promise controller and move the controller when you move the hd - not foolproof though - i had it work and not work for me

Yes, if you move the add-on controller card with the image it will usually (not always) work, because the controller usually has the same physical address. Before WinXP came out, I was recommending the use of off-board controllers just for that reason.

I'll try to remember the pci controller card tip for next time I upgrade to a new boot drive on my main box. Unfortunatly it won't work of course for swaping drives between systems as I was wanting too.
I suppose I can just install all the software into windows on both systems, but put the programs themselfs on a removable drive. Then when the drive is installed the programs are there on either system and when not installed it will show up as alot of broken shortcuts! I'll have to rember not to run repair programs much

I think that will work fine, I'd rather have had a swapable master boot drive, but I suppose I could live with a swapable slave drive instead. Just more trouble, like remembering where I install the programs so both systems look in the same folders etc..