Re: BACK-UP/Copy Hard Drive Question

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On Thu, 28 Jul 2005 05:50:00 -0400, katie jay wrote:

> -I have been slowly reading the ng and came across the message below in
> response to another poster.
> I am running XP Pro.
> I have 4 hardrives with one dedicated to documents and such. Three have
> plenty of space(152gb) and the OS sits on C which is 20 gb. I decided to
> use the backup that came with XP and went through the wizard, and I now have
> a complete copy of C drive on my H drive.
>
> I am wondering two things:
>
> will i be able to use that copy if I need to replace c drive due to
> problems, assuming i can get into the h drive through safe mode?
>
> if i copy the folder with the backup file to a cd, will it boot the machine
> if i am unable to get into for some reason or another.
>
> I do have the original cd's of the OS, plus ghost cd's that were made when
> the computer was built. Howver, that was several years ago and many things
> have changed.
>
> I keep cpoies of all programs on h as well so that I don;t have to go
> through all the rigamarole of finding them.
>
> thanks for any help with two questions.
>
> katiejay
>

Do you have XP Home or Pro?

If Home, XP's backup is good for creating extra copies of files.

If Pro, the ASR function in NTBackup is usable and can restore the entire
system. ASR is bit clunky in that to restore because it installs the
operating system and *then* restores from the ASR backup set.

Imaging software can be used with Pro or Home. The program creates an image
file (or files depending on options you choose). The same program is used
to restore the image. Neat and fast compared to ASR. With most of the
imaging programs the image files can be stored on CDs, DVDs, networked
drives, external drives.

I've personally used Image for Windows (www.terabyteunlimited.com) and
Acronis True Image (www.acronis.com). Both programs allow you to restore
the entire image (disaster recovery) or to explore the image and pull out
copies of specific files or folders. I like both programs equally well but
think that Acronis is easier to use if you're not very "geeky."

--
Sharon F
MS-MVP ~ Windows Shell/User
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Expand drive space and perform ASR
    ... You will get a 40 GB partition on your 300 GB drive. ... Yes you can put your old drives back. ... Note that ASR restore may fail on RAID. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: System Restore
    ... I don't think you can use system restore the way you are asking. ... you want to format the new systems and do a clean install of XP pro on them. ... It would be a good idea to use a drive image program to image the new drives ...
    (alt.sys.pc-clone.dell)
  • Re: Expand drive space and perform ASR
    ... ASR will recreate a 40gb volume and restore the OS image there? ... listed in the NTBackup settings) on the system partition ... Yes you can put your old drives back. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • RE: Will using ASR delete all other partitions?
    ... The ASR restore "worked" in that the system drive itself was restored ... however the D and Z drives were formatted without any opportunity to prevent ... > I know ASR backs up the entire system partition and restores it in the event ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.general)
  • Re: ASR - XP Pro q
    ... I have used ASR to restore from ... another check since it's been awhile since I created an ASR backup. ... test system has two IDE drives with three volumes on the first drive and ... The ASR backup file was saved to the second IDE ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)