Ghosting system drive (Vista)

Right so after the win7 debarcle (see win7 thread), I spent all of yesterday painstakingly installing updates, rollups, service packs and various other shit to get my computer back to normal. Something like 5 hours its taken me, and I'll probably need a new more hours today to get it all working.

Which makes me think that once I have it setup the way I like it, it might be a good time to create a ghost image for resy restoring later on.

HOw do I do that then? Is Norton the only program that does it? or is there some kind of freeware alternative. Is there anything I should know before trying this?

there are heaps of programs that can do it...

try http://clonezilla.org/

I've always just used norton ghost... which I highly highly recommend.

Buy a copy and keep phunkydave employed.

I use Driveimage

What it doesn't do is allow you to put the image back on a smaller drive later on. Bit of a "so what" to me.

clonezilla looks more interesting if you have multiple OSs though...

Dont use Norton Ghost its lame and won't do what you want. Get Symantec Ghost and image your HDD. Works a treat ...

You can also try Shadow Protect.

I recommend both of the above programs.

Will give it a try, cheers!

What he said.

Have you got WinPE or say Bart PE boot disks? If you do someone could probably email you the ghost32.exe program. You just boot from your PreOS and run Ghost32 and clone the BootPartition to another partition / drive / burn it to DVD / network share.

You can torrent it too. You can probably find a torrent of an WinPE ISO with Ghost then just burn it to CD

I could probably get you the full GSS install but its a full CD and if you have your own boot disk you really only need GHOST32 which is a couple of mb.

Of course the new version of Ghost would have had hot imaging (you can take an image if an HDD while its running). But oh no.. they had to go and make the entire development team redundant 4 months before release

DOS boot should be fine really:

http://torrentz.com/969345c4aa3855c8454e2f135d45615dd925a2fb

I have BartPE ISO's with Ghost I could upload if you get stuck. 160-odd MB.

I might get beaten down for suggesting this...

But have you tried windows backup ?

I'm not talking the old ntbackup from yester year

With Windows backup (running vista business SP1) I was able to backup my system drive to a usb drive.

I did the windows beta 7, somethings didnt play nicely for me and was able to restore to that point in time easily using nothing more than the vista dvd and my usb drive

Are you talking about Ummm ImageX - .wim files?

No, have not investigated that option. Did'nt even occur to me TBH, but what you are saying is pretty much what I needed to do- can anybody else comment on this vs ghost?

Why not just use ghost and KNOW that you have all your shit backed up and able to be restored rather than taking a chance on something that most of I can assure you have never tried.

What you want to do is basic.

I haven't used Windows Backup but have used Ghost 1000's of times to do it myself. Sounds like Windows Backup will do it too, along with a heap of other programs.

Its not really worth um'ing and ah'ing over for a week. Pick a program, create an image, store somewhere 'safe'.