Never reinstall OS again
 

It scares me to think of the number of hours (days) I have spent over the years reinstalling various forms of windows. Apparently my XP license has been used on too many different computers and now I have to call Microsoft every time I reinstall.

I do most of my work in various VMs of which I have saved pristine copies, but my base OS is XP and my goal is to never reinstall it again. Of course, I will be doing some research myself, but I thought perhaps some knowledgeable individuals could save me some time/offer some advice based on experience.

So, I'm pretty much looking at two methods. One, some form of disk imaging such as 'Active@ Disk Image'. Two, a raid array.

I am not very familiar with what raid config it would be but I am guessing that with the right setup I could just plug in another hardrive, it would clone, then unplug it and store. If I need to reinstall, clone from the saved drive.

As for the software option I would probably partition my HD into two equal sections then copy an image onto the other partition. I'm looking for something that can run in DOS so I can just bootup and make the copy. Any advice on what software is a good choice?

The 'Active@ Disk Image' software apparently is $100 -- for that price I'm thinking I might as well go raid. Thoughts?

Re: Never reinstall OS again
 

Just get a cheap imaging software, a RAID is too much hassle. Buy a second hd, clone the "live" one, put the second hd away. If your sys goes busto just take out the old hd, put in the other one, and fire up your sys again.

You can also do the whole thing for free, just use a bootable linux-cd, there are more than enough opensource-tools which will do the cloning-job.

Re: Never reinstall OS again
 

[ QUOTE ]
Just get a cheap imaging software, a RAID is too much hassle. Buy a second hd, clone the "live" one, put the second hd away. If your sys goes busto just take out the old hd, put in the other one, and fire up your sys again.

You can also do the whole thing for free, just use a bootable linux-cd, there are more than enough opensource-tools which will do the cloning-job.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hmm If I bought another HD I figured raid would be the fastest/simplest way to clone. Set to Raid0 (whatever the setting is that runs two drives that are copies of each other) plug one drive in, wait while it clones, take it out and turn off raid.

I do like free so your linux suggestion interests me. So could I boot, use some open source program and copy one 40gb partition to another fairly easily?

Thanks.

Re: Never reinstall OS again
 

I would use Ghost - all you need is a bootable floppy or CD to access it - no need for DOS (It has a built-in PC-DOS).

Re: Never reinstall OS again
 

yeah ghost is definitely my choice.

you can put yoru whole OS image on one DVD and just pop that in when you want to 'reinstall' your OS with all your normal programs and stuff

Re: Never reinstall OS again
 

Thanks for the replies. I will do a bit more digging into linux bootups vs ghost.

Re: Never reinstall OS again
 

Okay Uhh few things you may want to consider..
the multiple hard drives / raid array is nice but you will lose any thing installe dafter the last clone which is a pita after a while...

My parents have a desktop othat sits in the living room for the family to use... everyone but me is horrible with computers so they thing YES I want free weather report.. yes I was to download this porn titled virus.exe etc.. I formatted if like 10 times mostly because its easier then removing 1000s of trojans

Then I had an idea
I used a program called deep freeze...

basically what it does is it makes it so your machine has two states... frozen and unfrozen.

When unfrozen its a normal pc and is completely usuable..
When frozen its a normal pc BUT whenever you rebooted its any changes to the system are reversed... So if I changed my background when frozen it will work only until reboot


the catch - no place to store files...
entire thaw space. basically its a partition that is a few gigs that they can download and save files to without fear of them being erased.. just have to use common sense and not totally screw these up

Havent had to fix it since its by faronics and its claled deep freeze.. dont know how much it costs but i think it was cheap..

Re: Never reinstall OS again
 

[ QUOTE ]
Okay Uhh few things you may want to consider..
the multiple hard drives / raid array is nice but you will lose any thing installe dafter the last clone which is a pita after a while...


[/ QUOTE ]

I spend most of my time in virtual machines and I can save off copies if I need to. I rarely install new programs on my base XP install so really all I am looking for is a current 'snapshot' that I can restore to if my OS become corrupted or I have a security breach. I may just end up going the raid route as this also gives me a backup drive in case of physical failure.

Thanks for mentioning deep freeze hadn't heard of it before. Reminds me of restoring to snapshots on virtual machines. I will check this out some more, but I think it might be a nice fit if I was running my virtual machines on another disk.

Re: Never reinstall OS again
 

[ QUOTE ]
Okay Uhh few things you may want to consider..
the multiple hard drives / raid array is nice but you will lose any thing installe dafter the last clone which is a pita after a while...

My parents have a desktop othat sits in the living room for the family to use... everyone but me is horrible with computers so they thing YES I want free weather report.. yes I was to download this porn titled virus.exe etc.. I formatted if like 10 times mostly because its easier then removing 1000s of trojans

Then I had an idea
I used a program called deep freeze...

basically what it does is it makes it so your machine has two states... frozen and unfrozen.

When unfrozen its a normal pc and is completely usuable..
When frozen its a normal pc BUT whenever you rebooted its any changes to the system are reversed... So if I changed my background when frozen it will work only until reboot


the catch - no place to store files...
entire thaw space. basically its a partition that is a few gigs that they can download and save files to without fear of them being erased.. just have to use common sense and not totally screw these up

Havent had to fix it since its by faronics and its claled deep freeze.. dont know how much it costs but i think it was cheap..

[/ QUOTE ]

I am very familiar with Deep Freeze not only in a personal environment but in a corporate environment. It is absolutely awesome.

Not necessarily saying that this is the thing for you though, because as ^^ said, you cannot store files on the drive (Hand Histories, databases, etc) without losing them on reboot, unless you make that special reserved Thaw space, which I have never actually done, because I had no reason to.

The only places I have implemented this software was when I built a PC for my 7 year old neice, I put Deep Freeze on it so she could not possibly screw anything up. If she gets a virus, reboot. If she gets adware or spyware, reboot. If you want to install something that you want to stay such as updates, or some new game...you just thaw the image first and then make the changes, re-freezing it when you are done.

You can buy it at Faronics.com for like $36.

Re: Never reinstall OS again
 

In your situation, and what I plan to do next time I reinstall xp, would be to "obtain" ghost (which I already have) and use it to save an image of a fresh xp install to my external hdd. (This is easier, to me, than using multiple cds/dvds to burn to.) Of course, the thing to do would be to get all the programs installed that you want and everything just like you like it. This makes reinstalling a short process.

If all you want is a snapshot of the OS, as you state in post #8, windows does include a few backup tools. Even the xp cd has some os repairing utility that I can't remember the name of built in.