MexicanOnABike

hi. i just reformated and installed xp and all the fucking updates and all my needed software back. now i'd like to make an image of my drive so that i wont have to go thru that again. can someone recommend me a goooood image making tool?

DriveImage or norton ghost any good?

thanks for the help!

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SiN

ghost is pretty much the standard for that sort of thing...

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bendsley

I tend to favor Norton's Ghost over Powerquests' DriveImage.

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bal8664

norton ghost iswhat i use, pain in the ass if you don't have a dvd burner though because it'll be quite a few cd's.

sailor

Ghost.

We have a ghost server here at school that we use to reimage machines that come in for support that are totally hosed. Taked 20 minutes to get a completely new install on a machine. It owns.

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belkins

I've used Ghost and the Acronis products.

For workstations I prefer Ghost and for servers I prefer Acronis.

MexicanOnABike

super! thankS! i just bought ghost and did an image. hopefully it works in a couple of months! hehe. thanks again ppl!

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sob

I just used Ghost on my laptop prior to installing Service Pack 2. It was a total of 14 CDs, and the 14th crapped out.

Does anyone know if the only thing I lost on the last CD was what it was backing up? It was a movie I don't care that much about.

Put another way, could I restore an image of everything but what's on the last CD, or am I hosed?

Thanks.

bal8664

Hmm.. not sure about how that'll work. I'd recommend backing up all non-important system files, such as movies, music, images, documents, etc. to CD's while working in windows. Then deleting them and ghosting. You can probaly get it down to 4 or 5 cd's that way and it'll be much easier to restore in the future.

sob

That's a good idea. Thanks.

I bought (for $29) a hard drive enclosure that connects via USB 2.0. I can pretty much put an old 165 meg hard drive in it, and backing up those files should be a breeze. That enclosure is handy--it also has a couple of USB ports, as well as some memory card reading ports.


I've also got a freeware program called "Clonespy" that I can instruct to delete files on the hard drive, as long as the CRCs of the duplicate files match. A good double-check, IMO.


To add to the discussion, this is why I despise "activating" software. If I haven't made an image, and I have a crash, I've got to contact the software company again to reinstall a lot of programs.

You can do that once, or maybe twice (if you upgrade to a new computer) before they get testy. Macromedia flat-out lied to me about Dreamweaver, while refusing to transfer it to a newer computer.

To round out my bitching, today I get to return Media Studio (standing in line for a half hour) because its advertised "upgrade rebate" didn't mention that they won't honor bundled software. And we all know how much stores like taking back opened software.

I guess I'll quit whining now. Thanks again.