windows XP hanging

GuardianAsher · Post by **GuardianAsher** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 11:03 pm

Acronis True Image is the best backup program I've used. It lets you back up directly to CD/DVD, scheduled, bootable disk and recovery. It's what I use now.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 11:56 pm

I've been using Acronis the last few days on client jobs and I'm sold. It's faster than Ghost. I'm leary of making backups from withing Windows but I just use the utility booted from the CD.

Acronis also has excellent support for USB drives. I've made a few clones and images the last few days to USB drives, or drives connected to USB to IDE adapters and they've not only worked flawlessly, they were as fast as if they were connected to the IDE bus.

My only gripe is that it's not practical to make bottable floppies of Acronis - it takes 7 floppies. Sometimes it's easier to just disconnect the CD and connect the image drive to the CD ribbon. Now I have to work a little harder to share a ribbon, but with SATA drives becoming more common that won't be an issue for much longer.

GuardianAsher · Post by **GuardianAsher** » Sat Jan 21, 2006 1:45 am

Since we're on this issue, this is a story of Acronis saving my ass.

I'm browsing the internet, la de da, and all of a sudden, Firefox dies. I bitch, start it up again, then go back to what I was doing. Five minutes later, it dies, again. I run my Antivirus and antispyware apps aplenty, and nothing comes up. I figure it's a fluke, restart my computer, and load firefox once more. Ten minutes later, boom, it's gone. Run through all the usual suspects and trace it to the fact that half of my registry is gone... I'm taking a wild guess that someone shut down my computer incorrectly.

I run Windows System Restore, pray that it helps in some way. No luck... so now I'm saving files that I know aren't on the backup DVDs to my slave HDD, and tomorrow morning I'm formatting and loading the backups. Thank you Acronis

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Jan 21, 2006 10:05 am

Guardian, a nice little app is ERUNT. It backs up your registry every time you boot, or manually. I gave system restore disabled now and just run ERUNT before installing anything.

Yeah, I have an image I can fall back on (I usually make an image of the bopot and apps drive every month or two) but this is a lot more convenient if you just need to restore the registry.

You can restore the registry from either the recovery console or from a BartPE boot disc (which I prefer). Just run the EXE file in the c:\windows\ERDNT folder with the date you want and it's done.

I install this on all my client's systems now. Made short work of restoring corrupt registries on several occasions.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download1267.html

Executioner · Post by **Executioner** » Sat Jan 21, 2006 12:25 pm

I use ERUNT also since my win2k install at work crapped out, and the IS guys at work only wanted to reformat the rig. I have it keep a copy for 14 days before the old ones are deleted and replaced. I believe it defaults to 30 days, way more backups that I need, so I used the AUTOBACK instead and limit the backups to 14 days, while deleting old ones.