Windows Restoration

[PRWraith]

Well this board has some pretty knowledgable people. So I have a question.

I have all the images from the clean install of windows xp pro on a seperate partition. How do I use it to reinstall windows?

Having a nasty problem with windows explorer in a restart loop and all other kinds of general badness.

[thez]

I don't think that you can. Windows installation requires you to dismantle partitions and wipe the hard drive free, from what I remember.

AFAIK, the only way to do it would be to slave your current drive to another one that works, pull the images off onto DVDs, and then do it that way.

[PRWraith]

Yea this issue has gone seriously out of hand on my computer If this OS reinstall doesn't work i'm dban'ing it and doing a clean install. Well It's either that or a boot through the monitor, ya know how it is :_)

[JimJohnson]

i vote skip this re install and do a fresh clean install.

[PRWraith]

Well thankfully I found the program I used to make the images in the beginning. Thankfully now my desktop is back to original clean and amazing working order. Only wish i had taken the image with the big ass games we have nowadays pre-installed.

[JimJohnson]

Originally Posted by PRWraith

Well thankfully I found the program I used to make the images in the beginning. Thankfully now my desktop is back to original clean and amazing working order. Only wish i had taken the image with the big ass games we have nowadays pre-installed.

Thats not a bad idea. What program you use for the image?

[Wendel]

Hey Guys, I do this kind of stuff all the time.
I use Acronis to take an image of my computer about once a month. I save it on an external drive, it works awesome.
If you ever have to restore you just boot up from a CD and browse to the image you want to load and bam it's done in about 15 minutes.
I used to use it when I built alot of pc's, I don't do that so much anymore, but I would still highly recommend it. Well worth the 50 bucks, if you're too cheap for that there are other places you can find it...

[PRWraith]

^^^^^^

[JimJohnson]

Can I just burn one ISO on a portable drive then install it on all my Comps ? Or do the computers need same hardware for it to work?

[PRWraith]

Same OS.

And well obviously you can't put it on a drive to small to contain the original copy.

EDIT: Actually I haven't done it this way before but I think there's a way to backup different files to different images so you could cross OS backup.