Never reinstall OS again

LeapFrog · #1 02-12-2007, 01:51 PM

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?

pocketset · #2 02-12-2007, 02:11 PM

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.

LeapFrog · #3 02-12-2007, 02:18 PM

[ 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.

goldtoes · #4 02-12-2007, 02:45 PM

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).

Freakin · #5 02-12-2007, 03:54 PM

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

LeapFrog · #6 02-12-2007, 07:15 PM

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

CORed · #7 02-13-2007, 10:43 PM

There is a linux utility called ntfsclone that will make an image file from an ntfs partition and restore it. It is on most bootable linux CD's. You can pipe its output to gzip or bzip2 to make a compressed image. Another option is dd, a basic command utility that will make a byte for byte copy of apartition or entire drive. The only down side of dd is rhat it will also faithfully copy the random garbage in the free space, which wastes time and space. Dd isuseful for copying MBR's and boot sectors, too.

LeapFrog · #8 02-13-2007, 11:22 PM

[ QUOTE ]
There is a linux utility called ntfsclone that will make an image file from an ntfs partition and restore it. It is on most bootable linux CD's. You can pipe its output to gzip or bzip2 to make a compressed image. Another option is dd, a basic command utility that will make a byte for byte copy of apartition or entire drive. The only down side of dd is rhat it will also faithfully copy the random garbage in the free space, which wastes time and space. Dd isuseful for copying MBR's and boot sectors, too.

[/ QUOTE ]

Cool, thanks for the info. Haven't done much with linux in a long time, would it be easy to boot up off a linux CD and mount a usb hard drive? In terms of reliability how would you compare Ghost and bootup+ntfscopy?

mosta · #9 02-14-2007, 03:51 AM

if you don't go the raid way, why not skip dos and restores and extractions and boot discs and back up dvds etc, by having a clone that is bootable. look up xxclone. it's designed to make bootable xp clones (which xp normally won't do, eg with ghost (I tried ghost and my first clone booted one time, but never again)). it's cheap too. it is a complete clone of the disc with all the system and registry and boot info--but, also, it's not sector by sector. it's file by file. which means that it also defrags for you. last two times my drive failed I was up and running with all my programs (as of my last backup) literally in the time it took me to reboot.

LeapFrog · #10 02-20-2007, 04:15 PM

Ok, bit of a trip report.

Using a linux bootdisk and ntfsclone. Below is a link that describes how to do this. Figured I would give the commercial trial versions a chance first.
http://alma.ch/blogs/bahut/2005/04/c...ntfsclone.html

So, for commercial I'm looking at Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, and Paragon Drive Backup. Both Norton and Acronis have pretty terrible user reviews at Amazon, I don't think they carry Paragon.

Norton: 82 reviews 2.5 stars av -- plenty of tales of woe
http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Ghost-Compu...&s=software

Acronis: 11 reviews, 2.5 stars av -- more tales of corruption and frustration
http://www.amazon.com/Acronis-True-Image...&s=software

So, began testing on an older machine I have laying around that has Win2k on it. I first decided to try Paragon. Installed the trial version (30 days IIRC) and created the bootable recovery disk. Booted up, it doesn't recognize my ps2 mouse and it can't see my usb drive, oops.

Ok, onto Acronis. Same procedure (15 day trial) except after booting it can see the usb drive (and mouse, yay). --Interesting caveat here... Can only get the recovery CD to boot properly after a COLD boot crazily enough, during warm boots it either locks up or the computer shuts down LOL -- So I'm about to begin a backup of the drive from the recovery cd, after setting everything up and hitting proceed it says not available in the trial version. Gee thanks Acronis. I figured the backup from the recovery disk would be safest as there is no hot swaping, but thats not an option now. So, I try the backup from within 2k.

Everything goes smoothly and it takes about 5 min or so (2.5gb approx). I then verify the backup (a feature within True Image) that goes fine. Then I formatted the drive, booted up with the recovery cd and installed the backup. Success!

Ok, so now for the true test. Backup my main computer's XP partition and install on my older computer. Long story short it works fine and XP boots up on my old machine. I did have to specify to Acronis to make the partition active (this was not default), but that was it.

Now the trial version is for 15 days so you won't be able to create new backups beyond that. However, it appears that you can, using the restore disk, install your backups beyond this period (I changed my computer date to be months in the future and tried this successfully).

So, this looks to be a pretty good solution to what I was looking for. Only thing I can think to add is that I wasn't using the incremental backup feature (somewhat pointless for a 15 day trial version) and I imagine this could increase the chance of backup corruption. Also, since my images are relatively small I didn't use compression when backing up.