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]

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.

 

[hawthorne]

We use Acronis here at work. You don't need same hardware, Acronis actually has a built in utility to restore an image file to differing hardware.
We have one server barebones image and one desktop barebones image. We roll out the image to any incoming hardware, then customise by department/server role. Very easy to use.

We also do a nightly image backup of our servers and they generally run in 30 mins and compress down to a few gigabytes each.

 

[pullzem]

I've been using Acronis for several years to mainly setup a new HD or clone a bootup disk to a new HD that's going to replace it. It has a great imaging choice that doesn't take long to create and it offers you the capability of making a bootup CD that will restore that image as long as it's on another drive...preferably an external one or you can make a partition on a 2nd HD in your PC just to hold the images in a rotational cycle.

I've kept the 2 HD's I cloned from...250GB with Vista Ultimate 64bit and most all my software and games loaded and a 160GB with Media Center Edition and the same loaded games and software. That would let me just swap either of those into their respective PC's, bootup and fix the problem on the HD causing me to have to do this...or just re-clone and go from there if it wasn't a hardware problem.

Acronis has no real competitor equal to it's capabilities and is well worth owning for upgrade purposes.

 

[kukmuk]

Acronis is great for personal use and emergency restoration at the Enterprise level (I use Acronis True Image with Universal Restore some at home), but for enterprise doing ALL initial installs with acronis isn't really feasible. When I did IT at Fidelity we used a combination of RIS and Acronis. Acronis only backed up domain controllers, everything else was done using a combination of RIS and Active Directory software deployments. If you are interested take a look into using RIS to install a base OS (NOT an riprep image!! A CD install), then a script or user intervention to drop the machine into a software install organizational unit inside of AD. At home I have different OU's for development machines, gaming rigs, media machines, etc... Each OU installs different things like codecs, games, applications, browsers or whatever I need on certain types of machines.

When you get into enterprise level applications like active directory there is really no limit with just the press of F12 on boot =)