Recovery disk program within Win XP home edition?

[sundevil777 102]

The guys at Circuit City showed me the windows program to burn a recovery disk with all the stuff including drivers so that the next time my hard drive dies it will be easy to recover/reload a new hard drive. Starting from the disk with the edition of XP delivered 3 years ago is not so great.

Problem is, I can't find this program. Is it maybe something not on the home edition, but on the pro edition? Is it a component of XP that I maybe haven't 'activated'?

Is there some shareware or cheap software you can recommend to accomplish this.

I've been considering getting an external hard drive, but really just burning copies of my digital pics and a recovery disk with my windows config and essential software is all I really need.

Thanks for your help.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[rwieder 0]

Reboot - Do an F-8

Select Dos Promprt in the "Safe Mode"

Select "regitit"

It will restore your hard drive to it pre-crash status.

-Richard-
"You're Holding The Rope And I'm Taking The Fall"

[marks 0]

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Select "regitit"

regitit? the same as regedit? or did you mean regedit?

I just learned something, thanks.

if it is regitit, what does that stand for? i wont remember unless i know what it stands for.

[waltappel 1]

Quote

The guys at Circuit City showed me the windows program to burn a recovery disk with all the stuff including drivers so that the next time my hard drive dies it will be easy to recover/reload a new hard drive. Starting from the disk with the edition of XP delivered 3 years ago is not so great.

Problem is, I can't find this program. Is it maybe something not on the home edition, but on the pro edition? Is it a component of XP that I maybe haven't 'activated'?

Is there some shareware or cheap software you can recommend to accomplish this.

I've been considering getting an external hard drive, but really just burning copies of my digital pics and a recovery disk with my windows config and essential software is all I really need.

Thanks for your help.

xp home edition

xp pro

Walt

[rwieder 0]

Quote

or did you mean regedit?

Yes, this is what i meant. I misspelled it, sorry! If you can reboot with an F-8 in Windows Safe Mode, you can access your C (Hard) drive there and do the same thing there.

-Richard-
"You're Holding The Rope And I'm Taking The Fall"

[Lindercles 0]

I know XP Pro automatically creates a restore point everyday, I believe Home Edition does too.

You can find the System Recover Utility in the start menu at start/programs/accessories/system tools

[Lindercles 0]

Quote

Yes, this is what i meant. I misspelled it, sorry! If you can reboot with an F-8 in Windows Safe Mode, you can access your C (Hard) drive there and do the same thing there.

you can access regedit without entering safe mode, too. just click start/run and type regedit. then click file and export to export your registry keys, which you can then import later. but that only backs up your registry.

[sundevil777 102]

Seems like everyone is pointing me to the function that is useless if the hard drive is no longer working at all.

The last time my hard drive failed, I couldn't even get it to boot in safe mode. The drive is easy/cheap enough to replace, but I lost the stuff I hadn't backed up in a while and it takes a long time to update the system software.

Thanks again for your help.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[waltappel 1]

Gotcha. What you need is a good backup program that will copy your entire hard drive to another hard drive. One of the hard drives in my PC is there for exactly that purpose. I back everything up with DriveCopy once a week (or so).

Another good option is backing up to an external hard drive that connects using either USB 2.0 or (preferrably) firewire.

Walt

[Lindercles 0]

Oh, I see.

The program they may have been talking about is the Backup Utility, which is found at start/programs/accessories/system tools. that lets you create a backup disk. but i've never used it, so i can't comment on how well it works.

[70sdiver 0]

you can get a copy of norton ghost and do a complete image to a cd that will mirror your whole system as it is now if you want to sweep the hd then it just takes a click to reinstall your whole c drive about 49. dollars

[rwieder 0]

Go Here For Hardware

I carry a Lacie external USB port 80 Gig hard drive with me everywhere i go for this very reason. They come up to 2 TB sizes. Why do you think your hard drive bit the big one?

-Richard-
"You're Holding The Rope And I'm Taking The Fall"

[Lindercles 0]

Walt, you actually backup the whole drive once a week? How long does that take?

[waltappel 1]

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Walt, you actually backup the whole drive once a week? How long does that take?

I wasn't going to get into this, but since there are plenty of computer geeks around....

I think it's important to have a backup strategy. Not just a backup the whole drive to another big drive one a week, but a strategy that provides organization and efficient use of time.

One principle is that I think is crucial is partitioning the hard drive in such a manner that the contents of a single partition can fit onto a single item of whatever your backup media is. For example if you backup to CDs, your partitions should be 650 MB or smaller. For DVDs that number is somewhat larger (4 GB or so).

When you are backing up to a seperate hard drive, the time factor comes into play and you can save plenty by partitioning your hard drive in such a way that your infrequently changing data is in a seperate partition from your more volatile data.

For example, I put my "archive" in a seperate partition from my user data, which is in a seperate partition from my operating system and programs. My archive rarely changes so I rarely back it up.

I don't buy into the Windows' (I run xp pro) massive "Documents and Settings" directory structure thing. Every user on my machine gets his own "home" drive, which is a 650 MB partition.

So anyway, on a weekly basis I backup only the partitions that have changed data. I backup the whole partition rather than make an incremental backup.

Here's how I have my primary hard drive (76 GB) partitioned:

OS and Apps: 18 GB
System archive (system docs, downloaded programs, etc): 8 GB
my data archive: 651 MB
my current data: 651 MB
various other users: 651 MB each, except for one with a 4 GB partition.
video editing sandbox: 32 GB

I also have a video-only drive: 95 GB

My backup drive is about 160 GB

As I recall, the OS and Apps backup (18 GB) takes about 40-45 minutes.

The video editing partition takes a while, but I don't back it up often unless I'm doing a bunch of editing.

The 650 MB partitions just take a couple of minutes to backup.

I don't use Norton Ghost because I want to be able to retrieve individual files rather than an entire disk image.

I highly recomend Partition Magic for creating and resizing partitions.

If you do the math, you'll see that my backup hard drive is not big enough to hold all data if my primary hard drive and video hard drive are both nearly full. This is not a problem because I have empty space on my primary hard drive that is not assigned to any partition, so I can backup all partitions on my primary drive plus my whole video drive without running out of space.

Walt

[sundevil777 102]

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Oh, I see.

The program they may have been talking about is the Backup Utility, which is found at start/programs/accessories/system tools. that lets you create a backup disk. but i've never used it, so i can't comment on how well it works.

There is no 'backup utility', just the 'system restore' which just makes a restore point on the existing hard drive. It doesn't allow you to chose a different location/drive for the restore info/data.

The program I saw at Circuit City seemed to be part of Windows, under a "PC tools & help" program name. I went there to check out external hard drives, and the girl suggested that for my needs burning a disk with this program would be sufficient, which seems right.

Thanks again for your help.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[Lindercles 0]

Ok, that's interesting. So here's my question:

I have a 12 gig hard drive on which I keep my OS (XP Pro) and nothing else. I also have a 160 gig hard drive on which I keep all my files, as well as all my installed programs.

I have my OS hard drive backedup onto my 160 gig hard drive, but not in a separate partition. Would it be advantageous to repartition my 160 to give the 12 gig backup its own partition??

[waltappel 1]

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Ok, that's interesting. So here's my question:

I have a 12 gig hard drive on which I keep my OS (XP Pro) and nothing else. I also have a 160 gig hard drive on which I keep all my files, as well as all my installed programs.

I have my OS hard drive backedup onto my 160 gig hard drive, but not in a separate partition. Would it be advantageous to repartition my 160 to give the 12 gig backup its own partition??

It really depends on how you are doing the backup and what you want out of it. By using a seperate partition and using a backup utility insteadof a simple "copy" operation, then you are backing up the whole structure of your OS drive--not just copying the files. This gives you the possibility of restoring that backup to a new drive should your OS drive go shot OR if you have the backup partition as the first partion on your programs and files hard drive, then you could actually change your PC configuration to boot off of your programs and files hard drive after you "unhide" the backup partition.

Walt

[Lindercles 0]

hmmm, this gives me many ideas, and many more questions, all of which I'm just going to deal with later.

In other words, as Chris Cowden would say, PM sent.

[/hijack]

[waltappel 1]

Thinkin' about something I said earlier, if you have a hidden backup partition on your programs and files drive, and want to reconfigure your PC to boot off of the programs and files drive, I don't think it matters where the partition is on the drive as long as the drive itself is the master device on your primary IDE channel.

I have 2 IDE drives and 1 SATA drive on my primary PC and I suppose I could boot off of a SATA drive, but I've never looked into it, so the above may be misleading if you have IDE and SATA.

I'm pretty picky about what I want in a PC so I build my own, even though it is far more expensive, because I know exactly what I want. Designing the backup strategy actually comes into play when designing a PC.


Walt