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I have upgraded from Vista to Win 7 Home Premium 32. I want to create a system image for recovery purposes in the event of disaster. Tried it several times on discs and it didn't work. Would it work better with an external hard drive? I looked at HP250GB Pocket Media Drive with USB cable for about $80. Would this work for creating the system image and for recovery? Does a recovery put the operating system back on my laptop? I know that sounds really dumb, but it's all pretty confusing to me.

Excellll
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6 Answers6

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Yes it's really easy by using Norton Ghost.First take your system back-up with ghost and save it in your external drive.Whenever you need to recover the system,you can load your image to your disk by using norton ghost again.

NT.
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Would it work better with an external hard drive?

Yes, it's always better to keep a drive backup safe and sound on a external storage device.

I looked at HP250GB Pocket Media Drive with USB cable for about $80. Would this work for creating the system image and for recovery?

Most certainly, 250 GB goes a long way, most drive backup programs offer compression of up to 50%

Does a recovery put the operating system back on my laptop?

But of course.

My recommendation:

EASEUS Todo Backup, supporting Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 and Windows Server 2000/2003/2008, is a potent FREE backup software providing system backup & restore, hard disk or partition backup & restore, disk clone to protect your system and disk. It can back up whole PC, including the operating system plus your data, applications, settings and everything!

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I would always recommend doing a full backup to either a USB flash drive or an external hard drive.

Windows built in backup utility is brilliant for a full image, but if you want another tool, look for ImageX in the WAIK (Microsoft Windows Automated Installation Kit).

It is a tiny tool. I personally made a custom WindowsPE disk with this on it (the WAIK guides you through this) but you can put it on a usb stick and run Windows setup from the dvd or BartPE. You can then create a full drive backup very easily

Read here for more information on the tool. You basically need the \mount and \capture flags.

Here is the direct link to information on creating images.

Here is the direct link to information on mounting images.

William Hilsum
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I would partition the laptop's hard drive into a C:\ (system) and a D:\ (storage) type of layout. That way when you do use a system imaging tool you only image the actual operating system instead of a lot of data that changes often. Using a live CD might actually be a little easier to work with since you can have networking and internet access if need be. You can usually save off an image to just about anyplace such as a CD, DVD, external drive or network drive. If you're thinking about disaster recovery, you might also want to think about doing a nightly backup of your data so that you can also recover it if the laptop's hard drive fails.

Good luck, and hope this helps some.

Chris
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Tried it several times on discs and it didn't work.

What exactly did you try?

To add to NT's answer: You can't create an image of a system that is running, so you should create a bootable cd which contains ghost and boot with that to create the image. I can recommend BartPE to create such a disc.

Community
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fretje
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You can easily create a restorable image using Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010. They have a 60 day demo that will allow a running system to create an image. That image can be restored to same or different hardware or even convert to an MS or VMware Virtual machine image.

I used this before I upgraded to Windows 7 anad have used it to back up numerous systems before as well.

Symantec BESR 2010

Dave M
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